Eddie remembered the very last time they had walked beside the wall together. It was in December, and he was frozen from standing around a burning garbage can on Kedzie, selling Christmas trees. About ten, when the lot closed, Manny came by and they stopped to thaw out at the Carta Blanca. A guy named José kept buying them whiskeys, and they staggered out after midnight into a blizzard.
“Look at this white bullshit,” Manny said.
Walking down Twenty-sixth they stopped to fling snowballs over the wall. Then they decided to stand there singing Christmas carols. Snow was drifting against the wall, erasing the street that had hardly been there. Eddie could tell Manny was starting to go silent. Manny would get the first few words into a carol, singing at the top of his voice, then stop as if choked by the song. His eyes stayed angry when he laughed. Everything was bullshit to him, and finally Eddie couldn’t talk to him anymore. Stomping away from the prison through fresh snow, Eddie had said, “If this keeps up, man, I’ll need boots.”
“It don’t have to keep up, man,” Manny snapped. “Nobody’s making you come, man. It ain’t your brother.”
“All I said is I’ll need boots, man,” Eddie said.
“You said it hopeless, man; things are always fucking hopeless to you.”
“Hey, you’re the big realist, man,” Eddie told him.
“I never said I was no realist,” Manny mumbled.
Kapusta hadn’t had a lot of time since then. He had dropped out of school again and was loading trucks at night for UPS. One more semester didn’t matter, he figured, and he needed some new clothes, cowboy boots, a green leather jacket. The weather had turned drizzly and mild — a late Easter but an early spring. Eddie had heard Manny was hanging around by himself, still finding bullshit everywhere, only worse. Now he muttered as he walked like some crazy, bitter old man, or one of those black guys reciting the gospel to buildings, telling off posters and billboards, neon signs, stoplights, passing traffic — bullshit, all of it bullshit.
It was Tuesday in Holy Week, the statues inside the church shrouded in violet, when Eddie slipped on his green leather jacket and walked over to Manny’s before going to work. He rang the doorbell, then stepped outside in the rain and stood on the sidewalk under Manny’s windows, watching cars pass.
After a while Manny came down the stairs and slammed out the door.
“How you doin’, man?” Eddie said as if they’d just run into each other by accident.
Manny stared at him. “How far’d you have to chase him for that jacket, man?” he said.
“I knew you’d dig it.” Eddie smiled.
They went out for a few beers later that night, after midnight, when Eddie was through working, but instead of going to a bar they ended up just walking. Manny had rolled a couple bombers and they walked down the boulevard along California watching the headlights flash by like a procession of candles. Manny still wasn’t saying much, but they were passing the reefer like having a conversation. At Thirty-first, by the Communicable Disease Hospital, Eddie figured they would follow the curve of the boulevard toward the bridge on Western, but Manny turned as if out of habit toward the prison.
They were back walking along the wall. There was still old ice from winter at the base of it.
“The only street in Chicago where it’s still winter,” Eddie mumbled.
“Remember yelling?” Manny said, almost in a whisper.
“Sure,” Eddie nodded.
“Called, joked, prayed, sang Christmas songs, remember that night, how cold we were, man?”
“Yeah.”
“What a bunch of stupid bullshit, huh?”
Eddie was afraid Manny was going to start the bullshit stuff again. Manny had stopped and stood looking at the wall.
Then he cupped his hands over his mouth and yelled, “Hey! You dumb fuckers in there! We’re back! Can you hear me? Hey, wake up, niggers, hey, spics, hey, honkies, you buncha fuckin’ monkeys in cages, hey! We’re out here free!”
“Hey, Manny, come on, man,” Eddie said.
Manny uncupped his hands, shook his head, and smiled. They took a few steps, then Manny whirled back again. “We’re out here free, man! We’re smokin’ reefer, drinking cold beer while you’re in there, you assholes! We’re on our way to fuck your wives, man, your girlfriends are giving us blow jobs while you jack-offs flog it. Hey, man, I’m pumping your old lady out here right now. She likes it in the ass like you!”
“What are you doing, man?” Eddie was pleading. “Take it easy.”
Manny was screaming his lungs out, almost incoherent, shouting every filthy thing he could think of, and voices, the voices they’d never heard before, had begun shouting back from the other side of the wall.
“Shadup! Shadup! Shadup out there, you crazy fuck!” came the voices.
“She’s out here licking my balls while you’re punking each other through the bars of your cage!”
“Shadup!” they were yelling, and then a voice howling over the others: “I’ll kill you, motherfucker! When I get out you’re dead!”
“Come on out,” Manny was yelling. “Come and get me, you pieces of shit, you sleazeballs, you scumbag cocksuckers, you creeps are missing it all, your lives are wasted garbage!”
Now there were too many voices to distinguish, whole tiers, whole buildings yelling and cursing and threatening, shadup, shadup, shadup, almost a chant, and then the searchlight from the guardhouse slowly turned and swept the street.
“We gotta get outa here,” Eddie said, pulling Manny away. He dragged him to the wall, right up against it where the light couldn’t follow, and they started to run, stumbling along the banked strip of filthy ice, dodging stunted trees that grew out at odd angles, running toward Twenty-sixth until Eddie heard the sirens.
“This way, man,” he panted, yanking Manny back across the nameless street, jumping puddles and tracks, cutting down a narrow corridor between abandoned truck docks seconds before a squad car, blue dome light revolving, sped past.
They jogged behind the truck docks, not stopping until they came up behind the icehouse. Manny’s panting sounded almost like laughing, the way people laugh after they’ve hurt themselves.
“I hate those motherfuckers,” Manny gasped, “all of them, the fucking cops and guards and fucking wall and the bastards behind it. All of them. That must be what makes me a realist, huh, Eddie? I fucking hate them all.”
Sometimes a thing wasn’t a sin — if there was such a thing as sin — Eddie thought, until it’s done a second time. There were accidents, mistakes that could be forgiven once; it was repeating them that made them terribly wrong. That was how Eddie felt about going back the next night.
Manny said he was going whether Eddie came or not, so Eddie went, afraid to leave Manny on his own, even though he’d already had trouble trying to get some sleep before going to work. Eddie could still hear the voices yelling from behind the wall and dreamed they were all being electrocuted, electrocuted slowly, by degrees of their crimes, screaming with each surge of current and flicker of streetlights as if in a hell where electricity had replaced fire.
Standing on the dark street Wednesday night, outside the wall again, felt like an extension of his nightmare: Manny raging almost out of control, shouting curses and insults, baiting them over the wall the way a child tortures penned watchdogs, until he had what seemed like the entire west side of the prison howling back, the guards sweeping the street with searchlights, sirens wailing toward them from both Thirty-first and Twenty-sixth.
This time they raced down the tracks that curved toward the river, picking their way in the dark along the junkyard bank, flipping rusted cables of moored barges, running through the fire truck graveyard, following the tracks across the blackened trestles where they’d once shot pigeons and from which they could gaze across the industrial prairie that stretched behind factories all the way to the skyline of downtown. The skyscrapers glowed like luminescent peaks in the misty spring night. Manny and Eddie stopped in the middle of the trestle and leaned over the railing catching their breath.