When complete, my defiant pose will indicate that I’ve said: I’ll get you some paper towels. Mr. Dempster’s counter-pose will indicate that he has corrected me: No. You’ll GET some paper towels.
The problem, in terms of portraying the resulting tension to Darla, to the world, is how to edit-in all this action, which continues/continued as: Oh, the woman replied, aghast at the thought of wiping the vomit up herself; the baby’s bitsy head jostled, at the time driving me to conclude that if I were ever to sculpt a baby with a head so minuscule, it would be — and thus is now — deemed a disproportionate flaw (unlike portraying vomit, which may be imprecise); I walked to the back of the store and unraveled many paper towels from the spool, something I’d long gotten used to when cleaning Darla’s vomit at home; old popcorn was on the break table in a red plastic basket lifted from Chicken City; a stare-down ensued upon my return: the woman at Dempster, he at me; I stared at the baby and the vomit, and held the towels out for whomever would take them; nobody took them; the baby slung about, looking elsewhere; we were all at a crossroads, and my chest grew heavy as I again thought of Darla.
In the Alley That Runs Behind My Rotted Clapboard Apartment House There Are Sick Cats
IN THE ALLEY that runs behind my rotted clapboard apartment house there are sick cats, everywhere.
No. That’s drama. Mostly, they’re healthy. A clowder of lithe kittens not yet smashed by the low-riding thugs, or mauled by neighborhood dogs, dogs that crap by my back door.
But there is this one old queen. Her fur is the color of the street-plowed snow. Gunky ruts streak from her eyes, and the end of her tail is hairless, like a rat’s. She’s the only mature cat I’ve seen around here. Is Chicago’s queen regnant of Hermosa and Humboldt Parks.
I looked for her the other day, after Spec’s makeshift IED blew house paint and hot sauce over the driver’s side of a parked BMW. Within thirty seconds of the blast, half the neighborhood leaned out of their open windows. Aroused by confusion, their breath tufted in the winter air. It took three minutes for City of Chicago’s first responders to arrive, though a full two hours before the bomb squad had cordoned off the street. (This neighborhood is far more Hermosa than Humboldt, so the saving arrives in degrees.) In the interlude, many of us went outside to gawk, the young snapping selfies while wrapped in dramatic parkas, the old clobbering the cops with accusations of neglect. Having recognized the construction of the IED itself, I just looked for the old cat. As the pinky mix bled into the cavity of shattered side windows, I wondered if she was ready for what’s coming.
Fourteen degrees, late November, I find her tugging turkey bones from a fallen trash can. The foil that wraps the carcass scrapes the alley ice. In the four years since my out-processing from Bragg, having abandoned a return to Tennessee for the unknown of Chicago, I’ve never gotten near her. The cat pivots in precise opposition to my approach, her eyes fixed on me, her tugs convulsive. This is straight-up terminal endurance. It reminds me of an anti-world: urban ops, Baquba. Where high-rises meet skin- and scab-colored streets, and scars of charred sand and metal, and bricks like hailstones and sinews of rebar from pulverized terraces, and black spray-paint warnings on bullet-pocked walls. The plotted oases of palm trees and rushes amid the browns and blacks and bloated.
The fact is, that cat should die. I know this now. God knows it. You look into her eyes and realize that even she knows.
Enough spirituality. Woe-ish anthropomorphism. In the alley behind me, kids chuck bricks through the back windshields of parked cars. Did it again the other day, just below my kitchen window. Afterwards, I ate a ham sandwich and watched some hipster white girl cry into her phone while pacing the rear of her Subaru. From the rooftop of his cattycorner brownstone, Spec filmed her with a handheld, his face shrouded in black balaclava. At some point he noticed me in my window, lowered his camera and stared. I offered a slight wave, then held my right hand to my heart, Islam-style. He considered this, the snow dusting his black mask, then turned and disappeared.
Through the alleyside chain link, the kids poke sticks at old dogs, stabbing them in the gums when they bark. I yell at them to stop and they call me faggot and maricón, puta and bitch. It doesn’t bother me. The faggot stuff. The dog stuff does. I watch them hurl empty bottles against eroding brick walls, and sidestep the security cameras of the rehab-condos that flower around us. They dump over trash cans and wait for the race-modified Japanese cars to blaze through the alley. They taunt each other and yell like kids are supposed to, and dare each other to break windshields, and burn dope and get worried about kid stuff and Chicago public school, and walk and brag about their older brothers’ beat-mean dogs. Presa Canarios. American Pits.
We are under invasion. The horde of others buy and rehab the clapboard houses and small brick buildings, the refuse dragged through the alley in dump trucks, a hemorrhage of exhaust. In the early evenings, after work, these others cruise our neighborhood, gathering intel; they scout and evaluate and buy and sell the structures — the kids’ families still inside. Sometimes they skip the rehab altogether and just raze. Hired guns block off parts of the sidewalk with yellow tape, and then pickax the Slavic inscriptions off of the worn stone archways. Mercenary pickers strip the copper wire and piping, careful to crimp the gas lines, to always crimp the lines.
Or not. Mostly, these invaders merely patrol in pairs, in German SUVs, talking to each other but doing nothing immediate. They scout for the big red X that the city of Chicago bolts onto dilapidated buildings — indicating that public resources, e.g., fire trucks, should not waste their time.
(Third strategy: The invaders scout, buy, evict. . and then just sit on the empty houses. The kids and families are thereby redeployed: two blocks south, six blocks west. The windows and nooks and alleyside crannies of the empty homes are boarded over; the buildings sit in waiting for the black and Puerto Rican and Polish holdouts to turn over the rest of the grid.)
Sometimes, men and boys hire on to help destroy their own spaces. This, too, I saw in Baquba.
The pickers must crimp the gas lines so the buildings don’t explode. So the gas pockets don’t mark time for a spark.
In my tiny kitchen, on the bistro table beneath the window, is the application. It sits there, day after day. My VA home loan can or will buy a fixer-upper. I can or will play a part in an undeniable future. I can buy this place, or the one next door, and rent to artists or grad students or. . anyone who will wear this neighborhood like a medal, like a badge that indicates their life at the edge. This was the same dynamic in Nashville before the war. Hell, I think it was the same thing in Iraq.