My son already knows that I am not his real father. But I feel the day will come when he asks me about Marcus, and that is the day I want to be prepared for. I believe in honesty, and besides, my son should know who and what his father was.
He really should’ve known better, Marcus. He really should’ve thought about where he was, how far he’d come, where he was going. I guess he figured he could sneak back to Eighteenth Street. But like I said, when I found him he was in the alley by the supermarket, deep in our part of the neighborhood. Maybe he knew I was coming. Maybe he tried to avoid me by going deeper into where he should not have been. I don’t know what that man was thinking. Maybe he was just high.
He had broken back into the apartment. I’d heard the blinds chatter and bind. I’d stepped into the living room and seen him standing there at our front window, a silhouette before a flood of orange streetlight.
“Get the fuck out of here,” I told him, and started to run toward him. But Marcus was fast. He spun and stepped right out through the open window. I ran back into the bedroom and grabbed my sweatpants and shirt.
“What happened?” Blanca asked.
“I’m tired of this shit,” I told her. I threw my shoes on. “This is the last fucking time.” I reached into the dresser drawer.
“It doesn’t matter, Jesse,” Blanca said. “Just don’t do…” I don’t know how Blanca was going to finish her sentence. I was out the door with a gun in my hand.
The gun was Ricardo’s. It was the same.38 we’d had that night we went looking for Marcus. I knew a time like this would come. The baseball bat hadn’t worked and neither had the threats. “Don’t take it out unless you’re going to use it,” Ricardo had said. “Because once you take it out, you have to use it.” I remembered that later, after the shot, as I lay in bed, wondering if I’d killed the man, feeling guilty as I prayed that I had.
The only reason I went down the alley was because just as I came out of the apartment a squad car turned up Oakley. A few seconds earlier and they would’ve seen me, holding the gun. I imagine the nickel plating reflecting the squad-car headlights as I step out of my apartment. But I came out a few seconds after they passed my door, and so I turned down the alley.
I expected him to be right there, somewhere close, maybe hiding among the garbage cans just around the corner. I held the gun in front of me, then did a quick duck-and-juke move around the first bank of cans. Nothing. I started walking, sure that he was long gone. I put the gun in my pocket.
I walked to the end of the block, listening to pigeons cooing as they slept on window ledges. I turned onto Twenty-Third Place and suddenly there he was. He was walking slowly, strolling down the center of the alley right behind Leavitt Street. He had on a white T-shirt; I could see him clearly in the streetlight. He was wearing dark blue pants. He was long, thin. He moved like a cat, his steps more inline than side-by-side.
I didn’t say anything. I pulled the gun from my pocket and stepped into the alley. Marcus turned. I saw his eyes widen, the quick registering of who I was, that I was holding a gun. He turned and began to run. The sound sailed up the walls around us. I heard the pop dissipate as it rang into the open air above the apartment buildings. Marcus’s leg was up. It just didn’t seem to come down. Instead his whole body came down. I wonder how many people die with that same look of surprise.
I ran. I was three blocks from home. Traffic could be heard over on Western Avenue. Everything seemed louder than it should’ve been. I suddenly felt like I had to get to work, like I should hurry up and get dressed and get on the L. In my head I could still hear the shot, the way it climbed up the walls and then vanished. I turned the corner and stepped inside the apartment. I kicked off my shoes and sat on the side of the bed. I’d been holding the gun the entire time.
“What happened?” Blanca asked me. She was sitting up.
“Nothing,” I told her. I was out of breath.
“You didn’t do anything, did you?”
“No,” I said.
I got up and put the gun in the dresser drawer.
“I thought I heard a gunshot.”
“Must’ve been the traffic,” I said.
I lay down. I was shaking. She was staring down at me. I could feel it.
“Jesse, what did you do?” she asked me.
“Nothing,” I told her. “It’s cold out there. I don’t even know where he went. That guy’s a fucking chameleon.”
I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. I could even hear it in my breathing.
“Jesse, you know, he’s just going through hard times,” she said. “Just let him be. He’ll get over it. I know him. I know how he is.”
I turned my face into my pillow and closed my eyes. My wife finally lay down. I took a deep breath, then another.
I’ve never told anyone about what I did. And whatever neighborhood talk there was seems to have been confined to Marcus’s part of Pilsen. This is how it is when people have enemies. The gun still sits underneath my underwear, in my dresser drawer. For a few days my underwear smelled like gunpowder.
That was four months ago. Since then my wife has brought up Marcus only once, and even then it was to comment on something little Marcus did, how he “looked” like his father when he got frustrated. At night, though, each time there is a knock or a scrape near any window, my wife stirs. I can feel her wake up. I can feel her stop breathing for just a moment, as if even her breath gets in the way of what she thinks she hears.
I know she will start to suspect something, eventually. I know she will begin to suspect. And when she asks, I will not tell her I killed the man she loves. But my son I feel I must tell, at some point. Just so that he knows his father loves him. Just so that he knows his father would do anything for his family.
SUPERNATURAL
Only a miracle could draw people to that canal. It has been forgotten about, shut off from the main river years ago, left as a depository of dumped appliances, cars, street-gang hits.
It’s the perfect ghetto miracle. The toxic haze glowing bright green as if its light were filtered through emeralds. Maybe the years of dumped chemical solvents from the factory alongside it have finally yielded the kind of catastrophe scientific experts have anticipated for years. But this catastrophe is beautiful. A fluorescent haze that comes into sight each night, deepening as the heat of the day settles around the neighborhood.
They’ve been coming here for a week, the crowds, getting larger each successive night. The canal banks can barely hold the masses of people now. The spectators have begun spilling over into the factory’s gravel parking lot, onto the bridge that spans the canal, onto Thirty-First Street, filling it in for blocks, as if in exodus.
Word has obviously gotten around. Probably passed along the front stoops of the neighborhood like hot merchandise. Down Twenty-Sixth Street, past the Cook County lockup, past the taco stands, the corner taverns, the story indulged a little more with every pass and reception: The glow’s deep, man, I mean deep. People are being cured and shit. Lil’ Ralphy can walk again.
The words would have sailed over the junkyards, the sleeping drunks, the trade school, the abandoned drive-in. They would’ve come to rest at Cicero Avenue, where the ghetto stops and a vast field of open prairie spans from there to the next neighborhood. The words would’ve mixed in with other marooned statements, the old news that had come to rest there, no one left to listen: Crazy Frankie shot Player. Got me some wicked shit. The bitch is dead.