his hand into the opening and came out with a nickel-plated 9mm semi-automatic. He slid the barrel back until it clicked and shot forward with a sharp, metallic crack. “WHO THE FUCK WAS IT?!”
Lil Pat twisted in his seat, snagged Mickey by his collar, and slammed his head against the far window. Mickey’s eyes bulged, but he made no move—the gun laid limp in his stubby hands.
“I told you not to talk to the kid like dat,” Lil Pat said.
The two snarled at each other, eyes locked in some darkened collusion. “And put dat fuckin’ piece away.” Lil Pat released him. “Neighborhood’s hot enough as it is wit’ out you try’n to be John Wayne every five minutes.” Mickey returned the pistol into the stash and fastened the vent.
Lil Pat turned back to me. “Joey, it’s OK… Go home. I’ll see you at the house later.” The warmth in his voice returned.
I turned toward home, then looked back over my shoulder.
“Go on, it’s alright,” Lil Pat urged as the Lincoln pulled away.
I started for home, then darted into a parking garage across from the corner store. I ducked behind a green Nova and peered out into the intersection. A few seconds later, the Lincoln appeared northbound on Clark, stopping in front of the corner store. The back door opened, and Fat Buck got out wiping sleep from his eyes with his thick wrists. He looked up and down Clark and nodded back. The other three got out. The young one in back got in the driver seat while Lil Pat and Mickey walked toward the store.
“Hey… Look who it is, my favorite old shitbag!” Mickey spread his arms out, palms open, like he was going to give someone big a hug. He disappeared into the doorway, and Lil Pat stepped in behind him. Then, Lil Pat hoisted his knee up to his chest and booted over a large stack of pop cases just inside the door. They avalanched in a thunderous clang. There were more crashes and a large bang. Mickey raged in demonic tongues—only sparsely decipherable phrases leapt from the doorway. “THEMONEY MOTHERFUCKER! SANDNIGGER, FUCKWITHME, FUCKWITH ME!” It scared the hell out of me.
Lil Pat emerged from the doorway stuffing bills in his front pocket. He looked back and shouted for Mickey. A cheap champagne bottle smashed through the large front window. It arced slowly in profile with a wake of glass shards sprinkling after it like confetti. Then, it popped on the sidewalk and sent white fizz splurging out over the curb. The window crinkled and fell in chunks.
“I got us some champagne, brotha!” Mickey yelled as he walked out clutching a big dark-green bottle. Lil Pat laughed crazily, but he must have felt my eyes on him, because he looked back at me. His wide grin evaporated, and his mouth hung open in an O. The cross sat dead center in his solar plexus, and the etching threw flecks of the morning light in sharp glints. The old man moaned in defeated agony inside.
They piled into the Lincoln and were gone.
•
I HAD AN IDYLLIC CHILDHOOD. It wasn’t all dark. We had the best block parties in the whole city of Chicago. Da being a precinct captain, we were all kindsa hooked up! The fire engines and the cops on horseback would show up and hang out. The jumping bean would spend the whole afternoon on our block. Hundreds of kids from all over the neighborhood would show up to the 1600 block of Hollywood, and we’d have water fights that lasted the entire day—from dawn to dusk. Ma ran the whole thing, so we had dibs on everything, like the ice cream eating contests and the hundreds of water balloons we had in our little above ground pool.
Parts of the neighborhood were as clean as my brother Blake’s Gordon Tech letterman’s jacket. There was a tradition of ball hawks in the neighborhood, and Blake brought a group of us down there on the Clark St. bus. We tried to catch the home runs during batting practice and spent a bunch of time chasing the home run balls that bounced up and down Waveland Ave. We played baseball in the lot behind St. Greg’s gymnasium with racket balls and metal bats and cranked home runs all the way onto the roof of the gym.
Sometimes, my family would escape the city all altogether. We’d head up to Grand Beach during the summer to the old family vacation home that became the family home after Grandpa Walsh dissolved into alcohol. He passed before I was born, but long before that, my old man became the father figure to his six younger brothers. When they were little, all of ’em slept in bunk beds in one room. Grandma dumped a box of clothes in the center of it every morning, and they fought it out. The loser might be out socks or underwear, or worse. No wonder they all ended up so damn tough. They couldn’t make rent a lot of the time, and eventually the landlords got fed up, so the family’d have to up and disappear to the old summer house in Grand Beach. It was a place to escape—you could disappear into its winding roads and walk down its steep shored beach and look out across the lake to the city with all that blue in between you and it and know you were safe.
The drive to Grand Beach was always tough on me. I had a serous fear of heights, and the Skyway Bridge was the most terrifying thing to me as a kid. I’d cry and beg my Dad to turn around, then lay down on the floor of the van underneath the bench seats as my sisters and brothers teased me. When we got to the top, I’d stop crying, get up, and look out at the enormity of the lake and the city behind us. We’d be in Grand Beach within the hour, and we’d fish off the shores of Lake Michigan. We caught lake trout and king salmon, and it was always a blast.
Back in the neighborhood, our block was the kind of block where everybody knew everybody. Gossip ran up and down front porches all day and night, and you couldn’t walk very far without someone waving to you and asking about your family. The neighborhood was just a nice place to live in, and I loved being a child of Chicago and growing up in the greatest city in the world.
•
AFTER THE MURDER, everything changed. In the weeks that followed, I hung out with Ryan more and more. It was a secret, and like most shared secrets, it brought us closer. I started to have this reoccurring nightmare of Lil Pat and Mickey chasing me—their wild, hackling laughter blaring in my mind. Lil Pat brandished a large, cartoonish revolver with his massive, bubble-fingered hand squeezed tight around the grip. I would run through this neighborhood I’d never seen before in the night with its towering streetlamps looming above and emitting a thin glint of foggy, green light. I could never break away from them no matter how hard I tried.
At the end of the dream, the strange neighborhood would suddenly fall away to darkness. Then, the dead Assyrian would appear—just his face floating in a pool of red. When I saw the Assyrian’s face at night, I couldn’t sleep, and I’d wake with a horrible terror, panting. A cool silence hovered all around and above me. I’d keep my eyes shut because I knew he was there floating in my room. I’d keep my eyes shut because I was afraid to look at him. I’d keep them shut until the coolness dissipated. Then, I’d slide off the bed to my knees and pray. I’d pray for his soul. I’d pray Lil Pat’s soul. I never prayed for Mickey because I knew he had no soul to pray for. It happened every now and then. Over the years, it slowly slid and fell away and was overtaken by something even worse.
CHAPTER 3
THE LAKE
THERE WAS A HEAT WAVE that summer. It was a dry, coarse heat that scorched the lawns yellow and deepened the skin tones of the children. Grandma had told Jan’n’Rose to stay out of the sun so their Afro-Caribbean skin didn’t turn black, so they stayed in the house most of the day and walked the neighborhood at night. They’d go over to the apartment building two doors down to hang out with their friend Maria and flirt with the Mexican boys who lived there. They were always on the lookout for Lil Pat, Blake, and Rich, but they didn’t mind me tagging along. Maria was tall and thin with long, black, curly hair and thick, purple lips. Sometimes, for a joke, Maria would take me by the hand and lead me into
