“He got a cross-shaped dick,” Manny said.
“Only when I got a hard-on, man,” Pancho said, grinning, and they busted up.
“Hey, Eddie, man,” Pancho said, “what you think of all this, man?”
Kapusta just shrugged as he always did. Not that he didn’t have any ideas exactly, or that he didn’t care. That shrug was what Kapusta believed.
“Yeah. Well, man,” Pancho said, “I believe there’s saints, and miracles happening everywhere only everybody’s afraid to admit it. I mean like Ralph’s little brother, the blue baby who died when he was eight. He knew he was dying all his life, man, and never complained. He was a saint. Or Big Antek who everybody says is a wino, man. But he treats everybody as human beings. Who you think’s more of a saint — him or the president, man? And Mrs. Corillo who everybody thought was crazy because she was praying loud all the time. Remember? She kneeled all day praying for Puerto Rico during that earthquake — the one Roberto Clemente crashed on the way to, going to help. Remember that, man? Mrs. Corillo prayed all day and they thought she was still praying at night and she was kneeling there dead. She was a saint, man, and so’s Roberto Clemente. There should be like a church, St. Roberto Clemente. With a statue of him in his batting stance by the altar. Kids could pray to him at night. That would mean something to them.”
“The earthquake wasn’t in Puerto Rico, man,” Manny told him, “and I don’t believe no streetcar’d stop for somebody carrying a dead person.”
Amnesia
It was hard to believe there ever were streetcars. The city back then, the city of their fathers, which was as far back as a family memory extended, even the city of their childhoods, seemed as remote to Eddie and Manny as the capital of some foreign country.
The past collapsed about them — decayed, bulldozed, obliterated. They walked past block-length gutted factories, past walls of peeling, multicolored doors hammered up around flooded excavation pits, hung out in half-boarded storefronts of groceries that had shut down when they were kids, dusty cans still stacked on the shelves. Broken glass collected everywhere, mounding like sand in the little, sunken front yards and gutters. Even the church’s stained-glass windows were patched with plywood.
They could vaguely remember something different before the cranes and wrecking balls gradually moved in, not order exactly, but rhythms: five-o’clock whistles, air-raid sirens on Tuesdays, Thursdays when the stockyards blew over like a brown wind of boiling hooves and bone, at least that’s what people said, screwing up their faces: “Phew! They’re making glue today!”
Streetcar tracks were long paved over; black webs of trolley wires vanished. So did the victory gardens that had become weed beds taking the corroded plaques with the names of neighborhood dead with them.
Things were gone they couldn’t remember but missed; and things were gone they weren’t sure ever were there — the pickle factory by the railroad tracks where a DP with a net worked scooping rats out of the open vats, troughs for ragmen’s horses, ragmen and their wooden wagons, knife sharpeners pushing screeching whetstones up alleys hollering “Scissors! Knives!” hermits living in cardboard shacks behind billboards.
At times, walking past the gaps, they felt as if they were no longer quite there themselves, half-lost despite familiar street signs, shadows of themselves superimposed on the present, except there was no present — everything either rubbled past or promised future — and they were walking as if floating, getting nowhere as if they’d smoked too much grass.
That’s how it felt those windy nights that fall when Manny and Eddie circled the county jail. They’d float down California past the courthouse, Bridwell Correctional, the auto pound, Communicable Disease Hospital, and then follow the long, curving concrete wall of the prison back toward Twenty-sixth Street, sharing a joint, passing it with cupped hands, ready to flip it if a cop should cruise by, but one place you could count on not to see cops was outside the prison.
Nobody was there; just the wall, railroad tracks, the river, and the factories that lined it — boundaries that remained intact while neighborhoods came and went.
Eddie had never noticed any trees, but swirls of leaves scuffed past their shoes. It was Kapusta’s favorite weather, wild, blowing nights that made him feel free, flagpoles knocking in the wind, his clothes flapping like flags. He felt both tight and loose, and totally alive even walking down a street that always made him sad. It was the street that followed the curve of the prison wall, and it didn’t have a name. It was hardly a street at all, more a shadow of the wall, potholed, puddled, half-paved, rutted with rusted railroad tracks.
“Trains used to go down this street.” Manny said.
“I seen tanks going down this street.”
“Tank cars?”
“No, army tanks,” Kapusta said.
“Battleships too, Eduardo?” Manny asked seriously. Then the wind ripped a laugh from his mouth that was loud enough to carry over the prison wall.
Kapusta laughed loud too. But he could remember tanks, camouflaged with netting, rumbling on flatcars, their cannons outlined by the red lanterns of the dinging crossing gates that were down all along Twenty-sixth Street. It was one of the first things he remembered. He must have been very small. The train seemed endless. He could see the guards in the turrets on the prison wall watching it, the only time he’d ever seen them facing the street. “Still sending them to Korea or someplace,” his father had said, and for years after Eddie believed you could get to Korea by train. For years after, he would wake in the middle of the night when it was quiet enough to hear the trains passing blocks away, and lie in bed listening, wondering if the tanks were rumbling past the prison, if not to Korea then to some other war that tanks went to at night; and he would think of the prisoners in their cells locked up for their violence with knives and clubs and cleavers and pistols, and wonder if they were lying awake, listening too as the netted cannons rolled by their barred windows. Even as a child Eddie knew the names of men inside there: Milo Hermanski, who had stabbed some guy in the eye in a fight at Andy’s Tap; Billy Gomez, who set the housing project on fire every time his sister Gina got gang-banged; Ziggy’s uncle, the war hero, who one day blew off the side of Ziggy’s mother’s face while she stood ironing her slip during an argument over a will; and other names of people he didn’t know but had heard about — Benny Bedwell, with his “Elvis” sideburns, who may have killed the Grimes sister; Mafia hit men; bank robbers; junkies; perverts; murderers on death row — he could sense them lying awake listening, could feel the tension of their sleeplessness, and Pancho lay among them now as Eddie and Manny walked outside the wall.
They stopped again as they’d been stopping and yelled together: “Pancho, Panchooooooo,” dragging out the last vowel the way they had as kids standing on the sidewalk calling up at one another’s windows, as if knocking at the door were not allowed.
“Pancho, we’re out here, brother, me and Eddie,” Manny shouted. “Hang tough, man, we ain’t forgetting you.”
Nobody answered. They kept walking, stopping to shout at intervals the way they had been doing almost every night.
“If only we knew what building he was in,” Eddie said.
They could see the upper stories of the brick buildings rising over the wall, their grated windows low lit, never dark, floodlights on the roof glaring down.
“Looks like a factory, man,” Eddie said. “Looks like the same guy who planned the Harvester foundry on Western did the jail.”