“You rather be in the army or in there?” Manny asked.
“No way they’re getting me in there,” Eddie said.
That was when Eddie knew Pancho was crazy, when the judge had given Pancho a choice at the end of his trial.
“You’re a nice-looking kid,” the judge had said, “too nice for prison. What do you want to do with your life?”
“Pose for holy cards,” Pancho said, “St. Joseph is my specialty.” Pancho was standing there wearing the tie they had brought him wound around his head like an Indian headband. He was wearing a black satin jacket with the signs of the zodiac on the back.
“I’m going to give you a chance to straighten out, to gain some self-respect. The court’s attitude would be very sympathetic to any signs of self-direction and patriotism, joining the army, for instance.”
“I’m a captain,” Pancho told him.
“The army or jail, which is it?”
“I’m a captain, man, soy capitán, capitán,” Pancho insisted, humming “La Bamba” under his breath.
“You’re a misfit.”
Manny was able to visit Pancho every three weeks. Each time it got worse. Sometimes Pancho seemed hardly to recognize him, looking away, refusing to meet Manny’s eyes the whole visit. Sometimes he’d cry. For a while at first he wanted to know how things were in the neighborhood. Then he stopped asking, and when Manny tried to tell him the news Pancho would get jumpy, irritable, and lapse into total silence. “I don’t wanna talk about out there, man,” he told Manny. “I don’t wanna remember that world until I’m ready to step into it again. You remember too much in here you go crazy, man. I wanna forget everything, like I never existed.”
“His fingernails are gone, man,” Manny told Eddie. “He’s gnawing on himself like a rat, and when I ask him what’s going down all he’ll say is ‘I’m locked in hell, my angel’s gone, I’ve lost my luck’—bullshit like that, you know? Last time I seen him he says, ‘I’m gonna kill myself, man, if they don’t stop hitting on me.’”
“I can’t fucking believe it. I can’t fucking believe he’s in there,” Eddie said. “He should be in a monastery somewhere; he should’ve been a priest. He had a vocation.”
“He had a vocation to be an altar boy, man,” Manny said, spitting it out as if he was disgusted by what he was saying, talking down about his own brother. “It was that nuns-and-priests crap that messed up his head. He was happy being an altar boy, man, if they’d’ve let him be an altar boy all his life he’d still be happy.”
By the time they were halfway down the nameless street it was drizzling a fine, misty spray, and Manny was yelling in Spanish, “Estamos contigo, hermano! San Roberto Clemente te ayudará!”
They broke into “La Bamba,” Eddie singing in Spanish too, not sure exactly what he was singing, but it sounded good: “Yo no soy marinero, soy capitán, capitán, ay, ay Bamba! ay, ay, Bamba!” He had lived beside Spanish in the neighborhood all his life, and every so often a word got through, like juilota, which was what Manny called pigeons when they used to hunt them with slingshots under the railroad bridges. It seemed a perfect word to Eddie, one in which he could hear both their cooing and the whistling rush of their wings. He didn’t remember any words like that in Polish, which his grandma had spoken to him when he was little, and which, Eddie had been told, he could once speak too.
By midnight they were at the end of their circuit, emerging from the unlighted, nameless street, stepping over tracks that continued to curve past blinded switches. Under the streetlights on Twenty-sixth the prison wall appeared rust stained, oozing at the cracks. The wire spooled at the top of the wall looked rusty in the wet light, as did the tracks as if the rain were rusting everything overnight.
They stopped on the corner of Twenty-sixth where the old icehouse stood across the nameless street from the prison. One could still buy ice from a vending machine in front. Without realizing it, Eddie guarded his breathing as if still able to detect the faintest stab of ammonia, although it had been a dozen years since the louvered fans on the icehouse roof had clacked through clouds of vapor.
“Padrecitooooo!” they both hollered.
Their voices bounced back off the wall.
They stood on the corner by the icehouse as if waiting around for someone. From there they could stare down Twenty-sixth — five dark blocks, then an explosion of neon at Kedzie Avenue: taco places, bars, a street plugged in, winking festive as a pinball machine, traffic from it coming toward them in the rain.
The streetlights surged and flickered.
“You see that?” Eddie asked. “They used to say when the streetlights flickered it meant they just fried somebody in the electric chair.”
“So much bullshit,” Manny said. “Compadre, no te rajes!” he yelled at the wall.
“Whatcha tell him?”
“It sounds different in English,” Manny said. “‘Godfather, do not give up.’ It’s words from an old song.”
Kapusta stepped out into the middle of Twenty-sixth and stood in the misting drizzle squinting at Kedzie through cupped hands, as if he held binoculars. He could make out the traffic light way down there changing to green. He could almost hear the music from the bars that would serve them without asking for IDs so long as Manny was there. “You thirsty by any chance, man?” he asked.
“You buyin’ by any chance, man?” Manny said, grinning.
“Buenas noches, Pancho,” they hollered. “Catch you tomorrow, man.”
“Good night, guys,” a falsetto voice echoed back from over the wall.
“That ain’t Pancho,” Manny said.
“Sounds like the singer on old Platters’ records,” Eddie said. “Ask him if he knows Pancho, man.”
“Hey, you know a guy named Pancho Santora?” Manny called.
“Oh, Pancho?” the voice inquired.
“Yeah, Pancho.”
“Oh, Cisco!” the voice shouted. They could hear him cackling. “Hey, baby, I don’t know no Pancho. Is that rain I smell?”
“It’s raining,” Eddie hollered.
“Hey, baby, tell me something. What’s it like out there tonight?”
Manny and Eddie looked at each other. “Beautiful!” they yelled together.
Grief
There was never a requiem, but by Lent everyone knew that one way or another Pancho was gone. No wreaths, but plenty of rumors: Pancho had hung himself in his cell; his throat had been slashed in the showers; he’d killed another inmate and was under heavy sedation in a psycho ward at Kankakee. And there was talk he’d made a deal and was in the army, shipped off to a war he had sworn he’d never fight; that he had turned snitch and had been secretly relocated with a new identity; or that he had become a trustee and had simply walked away while mowing the grass in front of the courthouse, escaped maybe to Mexico, or maybe just across town to the North Side around Diversey where, if one made the rounds of the leather bars, they might see someone with Pancho’s altar-boy eyes staring out from the makeup of a girl.
Some saw him late at night like a ghost haunting the neighborhood, collar up, in the back of the church lighting a vigil candle; or veiled in a black mantilla, speeding past, face floating by on a greasy El window.
Rumors were becoming legends, but there was never a wake, never an obituary, and no one knew how to mourn a person who had just disappeared.
For a while Manny disappeared too. He wasn’t talking, and Kapusta didn’t ask. They had quit walking around the prison wall months before, around Christmas when Pancho refused to let anyone, even Manny, visit. But their night walks had been tapering off before that.