Brush Back

“Nope. I play a little basketball, but mostly I run the lakefront. You still playing baseball?”

“With this body? Slow-pitch sometimes with the geriatric league. But my boy, Frankie Junior, Tori, I got my fingers crossed, but I think he’s the real deal.”

“How old is he?” I asked, more out of politeness than interest: Frank always thought someone or something was going to be the real deal that made his fortune for him.

“He’s fifteen now, made varsity at Saint Eloy’s, even though he’s only a freshman. He’s got a real arm. Maybe he’ll be another Boom-Boom.”

Meaning, he could be the next person to make it out of the ’hood into some version of the American dream. There were so few of us who escaped South Chicago’s gravitational pull that the neighborhood could recite our names.

I’d managed, by dint of my mother’s wishes, and my scholarships to the University of Chicago. My cousin Boom-Boom had done it through sports. He’d had seven brilliant seasons with the Blackhawks until he injured his ankle too badly for the surgeons to glue him back in any shape to skate. And then he’d been murdered, shoved off a pier in the Port of Chicago, right under the screw of the Bertha Krupnik.

When Boom-Boom and Frank hung out together, Frank hoped he’d be a real deal, too, in baseball. We all did—he was the best shortstop in the city’s Catholic League. By the time I started law school, though, Frank was driving a truck for Bagby Haulage. I don’t know what happened; I’d lost touch with him by then.

Maybe he could have been a contender. He wasn’t the only kid in South Chicago with a spark of promise that flared up and died. They start to spread their wings and then they fall to earth. It’s hard to leave the world you know. Even if it’s a painful place at times, you grow up learning how to navigate it. The world north of Madison Street looks good on TV, but it has too many hidden traps, places where a homey can make a humiliating mistake.

Perhaps Frankie Junior would have the drive, the mentors and the talent to be another Boom-Boom. All I said was I hoped Frank was right, it would be great. “You stayed in South Chicago?” I added.

“We moved to the East Side. My wife—uh, Bet—uh,” he stumbled over the words, his face turning a richer shade of brick.

Frank had left me for Betty Pokorny when we were all in high school. Her father had owned Day & Night Bar & Grill. When the mills were ru

When Betty started smirking at me in the high school hallway, I’d been heartbroken for a few weeks, but my dad told me that Frank wasn’t right for me, that I was looking for love in all the wrong places because Gabriella had died a few months earlier. He’d been right: it had been years since I’d thought about either Frank or Betty.

Looking at Frank this morning, in his ill-fitting jacket and uneasy fidgeting, he seemed vulnerable and needy. Let him imagine that hearing about Betty could cause me a pang or two.

“How are Betty’s folks?” I asked.

“Her ma passed a few years back, but her dad is still going strong, even without the bar—you know they had to shut that down?”

“Someone told me,” I said. Day & Night had followed the mills into extinction, but by then I was so far removed from the neighborhood that I hadn’t even felt Schadenfreude, only a vague pity for Frank.

“Her dad, he keeps busy, he’s handy with tools, builds stuff, keeps the house from falling over. I guess you don’t know we moved in with him when, well, you know.”

When they got married, I guessed. Or maybe when Stella went to prison. “What did you do about your place on Buffalo?”

“Ma kept it. My dad’s insurance or something let her make the payments while she was in Logan. I looked in on it once a week, made sure nothing was leaking or burning, kept the rats and the gangbangers from moving in. Ma says she owns it clear and free now.”

“She’s out?” I blurted.

“Yeah. Two months ago.” His heavy shoulders sagged, further stressing the shoulders in the jacket.

A

South Chicago was a neighborhood where violence was routine, ordinary. Stella Guzzo had grown up in a hardscrabble house herself and shouting and hitting were her main modes of functioning. We all knew she hit her daughter, but what turned people’s stomachs was that Stella had beaten A

“I never made those marks on my girl,” Stella protested at the trial. “They’re lying about me, making me look bad because I was trying to get A

Father Gielczowski, the priest at St. Eloy’s, had testified for Stella: She was a good woman, a dedicated mother. She didn’t spare the rod, but that was what made her a good mother; she didn’t tolerate the rudeness a lot of modern women let their children get away with.

Priests usually play well with Chicago juries, but not this time. Stella was built on massive lines, not fat, but big, like the figurehead of a Viking ship. Frank took after her, but A

Instead of manslaughter, the state went for second-degree homicide, and got it. I didn’t remember the trial clearly, but I don’t think the jury deliberated longer than half a day. Stella drew the full two dimes, with a little extra thrown in to punish her for her belligerent attitude in court.

I never would be a Stella fan, but the thought of her alone in a decrepit South Chicago bungalow was disturbing. “Is she there by herself?” I asked Frank. “It’s hard dealing with the outside world when you’ve been away from it so long. Besides that, South Chicago is a war zone these days, between the Kings, and the Insane Dragons and about five other big gangs.”

He fiddled with a chrome paperweight on my desk. “I told Ma it wasn’t safe, but where else was she going to go? Betty didn’t want her living with us. It didn’t seem right, turning my own mother away after all she’s been through, but, you know, she’s not the easiest person to have around. Ma said she knew when she wasn’t wanted. Besides, she insisted on returning to the old place. It’s hers, she says, it’s what she knows.

“She doesn’t care that the neighborhood’s shot to heck. Or she cares but all her old pals, they’ve moved further south, or they’re in assisted living. Either way, she doesn’t want to be near them. Thinks they’ll always be talking about her behind her back.”

Frank dropped the paperweight. It bounced onto the floor where it dented one of the boards. We watched it roll under my worktable.

“That isn’t why you came up here today, is it, Frank?” I asked. “You’re not imagining I’ll babysit Stella, I hope.”

He picked up a stapler and started opening it and snapping it shut. Staples began falling onto the desktop and floor. I took it from him and set it down, out of his reach.

“What is it, Frank?”

He walked to the door, not trying to leave, just trying to pull words together. He walked around in a circle and came back.