Страница 29 из 34
I love her. Don’t get me wrong. Although after all these years, after two children, I am not entirely convinced she loves me. But this is not important. Because, you see, I am a desperate man, and my only wish is to come home to a family. Children who call me Daddy and a wife who will never cheat. In many ways our marriage seems born of convenience. Such is the case with desperate people.
Her boy, our boy, turned five in December. His name is Prince Marcus; I don’t like the name. He was named after his father, and so the boy is cursed. Each time I speak or hear our son’s name, I am reminded of the man I killed four months ago in the alley three blocks down from where we live. I walk by there often. I need to in order to get to the supermarket. And I look down the alley and expect to see his body there, slumped over, perfectly camouflaged like a bag of trash next to an overflowing garbage can.
I didn’t know him personally, not before I married Blanca. He was from Eighteenth Street, and in this neighborhood Eighteenth Street and Twenty-Second Street are night and day, two opposite sides of the universe. He really should’ve known better than to come around. I suppose the fact that he didn’t respect the obvious made me dislike him even more.
Marcus was the leader of the Laflin Lovers. His name on the street was Prince Marcus. The Laflin Lovers were not a big gang. They were one of hundreds in our neighborhood, thirty or so members, two or three street corners’ worth of turf. But the Laflin Lovers had a reputation. They were crazy. They jumped rivals in front of families. They pulled drive-bys in front of schools, churches. I’d heard of Prince Marcus long before I ever met Blanca. And then there was Orejas, Pac-Man, Lepke — all Laflin Lovers, all with ugly reputations, all under the leadership of Prince Marcus. Maybe this is what attracted my wife.
My wife and Prince Marcus had the fortune of ending up at the exact same school at the exact same time, and when I think about it, timing seems to be the culprit for everything. Benito Juarez High School was built on Blue Island Avenue and Twenty-Second Street, strategically placed to take in kids from both sides of the neighborhood, Twenty-Second and Eighteenth. While this was probably the brainstorm of a lifetime for some city pla
There were Chicago police units assigned to Juarez. Their primary job was to pick up the pieces. The wars went on.
It still offends me somewhat that my wife has a history with another man. I know this is petty. Plenty of marriages are actually second and third marriages. But I think my attitude would be different if my wife had been in a relationship with a different kind of guy. The first two years I was with her, I actually got to know Marcus quite well: there was the time he kicked down our front door, the time he threw a brick through the front window of my car while I was driving, the time he nearly OD’d in front of our apartment, puke streaming down his chin onto his black T-shirt. That morning my wife took him in and put him under a cold shower. She knew exactly what to do. She massaged his chest. She gave him blankets, our blankets, and made him chicken noodle soup. He ate breakfast with us, and lunch and di
But it’s not like I grew up in Wi
“It’s chambered,” Ricardo said as he handed me the gun. “Careful.” The gun was small, nickel-plated. It fit perfectly into my hand. It was the same piece we had used over New Year’s to shoot off rounds in Ricardo’s gangway. I remembered how quiet it had been. How I’d expected some loud blast but had gotten only a shallow pop that between buildings echoed with a sharp hum.
We cruised Eighteenth Street. We started at Damen Avenue and worked our way east. We slowed down at the taverns, watched who was going in, who was coming out. I held the gun hidden at my thigh, ready to raise it the second I recognized him. At Cirito’s pool hall on Blue Island Avenue we pulled to the curb and peered in through the torn black tint that covered the plate-glass windows. On the sidewalk a young girl, a teenager, walked out of a grocery store. She looked into the car as she passed. She saw Ricardo and me and for a quick moment she searched our faces, trying to figure out what we were doing. Something registered. Suddenly the girl turned her head and began walking faster. I looked to Ricardo. He was still studying the pool hall; he hadn’t noticed her. I waited for the girl to turn and look again but she never did.
Marcus wasn’t there, just a bunch of kids, gangbangers in training, shaved heads, Dago-T’s. We pulled away and reached Halsted Street. Then we turned back west. Sweat coated the grip of the gun. I felt as if I was fisting a dirty quarter. I switched hands, flexed my fingers, then wiped my palm on the knee of my jeans. By the time we got to Damen Avenue the gun was under my seat, tucked away in case we got pulled over.