But it's a nice night and a nice walk over to the pig park, and it don't hurt to talk about it. We sit on a bench across the street and look at the vacant lot sitting between two old houses, which the people living in them obviously care about.

  "Two bedrooms and a bath and a half?" I say.

  "Three bedrooms, two and half if we can afford it," Mary says. I understand why she's thinking three bedrooms. For kids. If they're both girls or both boys, okay, two bedrooms for the family's plenty. But if one's a boy and one's a girl, there you go. You got to have a bedroom for each kid. And suppose there's more than two kids. Well, there you got no immediate problem. Girl or boy you can double it up. But say you got four—three of one and one of the other.

  Here I am thinking about a house and kids, and it shakes me again that I got to do a little better for myself and for Mary and for the kids we ain't even got yet. I can't be a sewer inspector all my life. I got to reach for bigger and better things.

  And that, don't ask me why, gives me the blues.

  Mary's like a cat, she senses when things ain't right with me. She won't let me brood about anything but jumps right on it.

  "Something bothering you, Jimmy?" she says.

  "No, no," I say, doing a quick cover-up, "I was just thinking about what I got to do tomorrow. For one thing, I got to go see how Delvin's doing."

  Mary's not dumb. She knows I don't want to talk about building a house anymore. She knows enough to let me cut myself a little slack. So we just sit there holding hands, and after a while we start necking like a couple of teenagers. Only I don't think the kids call it necking anymore.

  TEN

  The next day is one of those days. I get an emergency call from the ward office at six o'clock in the morning. There's a major toxic spill from some factory into the line feeding the water filtration plant over to Rainbow Park, and all the inspectors and supervisors get called in to put their shoulders to the wheel.

  I even got to put on a respirator and a tank and go down into the sewers to see how far the poison has spread downstream.

  I can't find five minutes for myself.

  By the time I get home I'm worn out and filthy. All I want to do is soak in the tub and maybe sleep there until morning. But Mary comes in and helps dry me off.

  "Your father's coming over with that builder friend of his," she reminds me.

  When Mike arrives with Stavros Bikas, a Greek with skin like leather and blue eyes buried in a mess of laugh lines, Mary and me've had our supper and I'm sitting at the kitchen table in my underwear and a bathrobe.

  I shake hands with Bikas when my old man introduces us, and we look each other over.

  "Excuse me. I'll go in and put on my pants," I say.

  "What do you need with your pants?" Bikas asks. "You're comfortable without your pants at the end of a long day's work, it's better you sit around in your bathrobe. What a man wants to do in his own home, everybody should respect, ain't that right?"

  We all agree on that.

  Mary offers him something to drink.

  "What are you having?" he says.

  "We've got a little wine and some beer, but we're having coffee."

  "Coffee's fine."

  "We're having some canned peaches and condensed cream for dessert," I say.

  "That'll hit the spot," he says, and he sits down like we've known each other for years. He lays this thick loose-leaf book down on the table.

  It's a warm night, so he asks Mary very politely if he can take off his jacket. He's wearing an old-fashioned undershirt without sleeves on underneath. He's got the coloring of a man who's worked outside in the weather all his life. His face, his neck, and his arms halfway up, where he rolls his sleeves, are like brown leather. The rest of him is white as a bone.

  The veins stand out on his arms and hands like rope. You can see he's worked hard all his life and he ain't about to slow down.

  "Stavros is crowding eighty, would you believe it?" Mike says. "When a job's short-handed he still swings a hammer or lays some brick."

  "When I'm sixty-eight," Bikas says, grinning from ear to ear, "I'm working a job over to Evanston. I'm laying brick. The job steward from the union comes over to me. He says, 'Mr. Bikas, you got to slow down.' I say, 'Why for I got to slow down?' He says, 'You layin' too many bricks. You makin' the other men look bad.' I say, 'The other men are thirty, maybe even forty. How come they can't keep up?' 'Well, Mr. Bikas,' he says, 'maybe they could keep up if they wanted to push themselves. But the union only asks bricklayers to lay four hundred bricks a day. You're laying almost eight. So you got to slow down.' 'Well,' I say, 'when I learned my business I was told you give a man an honest day's work for an honest day's pay.' That's what I say."

  Mike is beaming at Bikas like he invented him.

  "Now I'm a contractor. My crews give me an honest day's work for an honest day's pay," he goes on. "Don't you worry." He opens up the big book. It's filled with page after page of pictures, some a little out of focus, of all kinds of houses.

  "Take a look. Pick out a house you like."

  I can see Mary's getting excited. The idea of having a house of her own is suddenly real to her. Before, all we was doing was dreaming out loud. Now, here's this little old Greek, tough as an olive tree, ready to turn her dreams and our conversations into sticks and stones.

  Bikas and my old man lean back and drink coffee while Mary and me turn over the pages. All of a sudden she puts her finger on a photo of a two-story house with a porch, a couple of bay windows, and what they call dormers in the roof upstairs.

  Bikas takes a look.

  "That's a nice house. I work on that house thirty years ago. So that's what you want your house to look like? Okay. But first let me tell you that's a big house. It don't look so big in the picture, but it's a big house. I'll make you a house looks like that only smaller. But first of all you better think about it. You don't need a porch. Nobody builds a porch anymore because nobody sits out on a porch anymore. Not in a neighborhood like the one you're going to be building in. People still hang around on the porch or the stoop in neighborhoods like this or the one I live in. In streets with one-family, two-family houses, nobody sits on the porch.

  "Television keeps people inside. They don't sit around on the stoops and porches anymore, passing the time of day. Like when I was a boy we still had outhouses where I lived over to the Back of the Yards. If you didn't see your neighbor outside on the porch, you saw him walking back to the outhouse. You said hello. It was friendly."

  I could imagine people saying hello on the way to the outhouses. That was Mr. Bikas's memory of better times. Mine was people sitting out on stoops and porches on summer nights. I couldn't imagine what my kids would be looking back on someday saying them was the good old days.

  "So you don't need a porch," he goes on. "Maybe you don't need the bays in front. Nobody walks that much anymore. Who wants to sit in a bay and watch the cars go by? Only old people who got nothing else to do. You got plenty to do. Besides, houses nowadays are built facing the back yards. So maybe we put the living room in the back with a nice bay, you could look out on a garden."

  I can tell that Mary can see the garden.

  Bikas takes out a stub of pencil and turns to a blank page at the back of the album. He starts sketching out a house, keeping up a steady stream of chatter and explanation.

  "Here we got the entrance. A little hall big enough for a guest closet and a staircase going upstairs. We make it two steps down into the living room. That makes it feel a little grand, you understand what I'm saying? Over here the kitchen. Big. Like this one. You should have room for a table and chairs. Who needs with these lousy little breakfast nooks? Make the kitchen big and the hell with the dining room. Are you going to want to waste all that space on a room you use twice, maybe three times a year? On holidays and when the in-laws come to visit? You know what I mean? Unless you're very social. Unless you entertain people for dinner a lot."

  "The people we have over for dinner would just as soon eat in the kitchen," I say.

  "There you go. Dining rooms are foolish. So I give you a nice pantry in the kitchen. You could walk into it."

  Bikas is a talker. He's making the sketch he's drawing with this stubby little pencil clutched in his stubby little hand come right up off the page. I can practically see it.

  "Over here the living room, in the back. Down this hall the guest room. You don't want guests, you use it to store junk. Everybody's got ten tons of junk nowadays. They ain't using it, but maybe they'll want it someday. It's too good to throw away. So they got no place to put it. Take my advice. Never mind the guests, keep this room for junk. Unless you have so many kids you need the extra room. Then you toss the junk in the garage, leave your car on the street. Who puts their car in the garage anymore?"

  By the time he finishes drawing the second floor, any ideas Mike might've put in my head about actually doing some of the building myself goes out the window.

  "So," Bikas says, like he's just pushed a truck uphill, "that's that. You want me to handle permits, you want to handle permits? You want me to pick the subcontractors, you want to pick the subcontractors?"

  "What are we looking at here, Stavros?" Mike asks.

  "You do the permits and subs, this and that, you're looking at a saving of maybe twenty percent. House costs a hundred thousand if I do it all, costs you eighty, maybe eighty-five you do that donkey work yourself."

  "Well, that's okay, then," Mike says, "Jim's walking around all day anyway. He could do it on the way here and there."

  "Sure," Bikas says, and he grins like he knows something even Mike don't know.

  "How long before we can have some drawings so James can start getting the permit?" Mary asks.

  "Two, three days."

  "How can you do it so fast?" I ask.

  "Easy. I save all the drawings of every house I ever worked on. I copy this part of one, that part of another. Put it all together, run it through the blueprint machine. All the specs are boilerplate. Every house is special when it's finished, but in the beginning they're pretty much all alike."

  ELEVEN

  The next day is more of the same. There's still trouble in the sewer and reclamation system, though I don't have to go down and walk it again.

  The next day we find the problem.

  It's been four days since I last visited Delvin, so I go over to Larkspur on my lunch hour. I don't wait until two o'clock because I'm feeling guilty about letting it go so long.

  I can see how somebody with a sick relative could find excuses not to go visit. It's such a sad thing to have to do.

  It looks like it could rain. The sky's gray and flat, and there's that smell of dust in the air.

  This time there's no residents sitting out on the enclosed side porch watching television, but I see the big black man, Robert, sitting behind the desk reading a comic book.

  His lips are moving, and I get the idea that he's having a hell of a time following the story. I've got to clear my throat before he knows I'm there.

  "You cut yourself shaving?" I say, meaning the scar on his face. When he grins, he practically blinds me.

  "No offense," I add.

  "Hey, mon, I like de way you come right out wid it. Mos' people take one look at me and dey so skeered dey try to look ever'where excep' at mah face. I get dis cut from a razor, sure enough, but not whilst I was shavin'."

  "I come to visit."

  "Visitin' hours not till two o'clock. De old people havin' to eat now."

  "So I don't think my friend Delvin'll mind if I sit with him while he has his lunch."

  "Maybe he don' min', but de front office min's, you know?"

  "Anybody in the front office I could talk to?"

  "No, dey's havin' dere lunch, too."

  "So you're the man in charge?"

  "Dat right. I'm de mon."

  "You from Haiti?"

  "I from Trinidad."

  "Nice and warm in Trinidad. No cold winters like here in Chicago."

  "Oh, mon, you bring back sweet memories."

  "Ever think about going home for a visit?"

  "Ver' expensive, dat."

  I take a ten-dollar bill out of my pocket and put it on the desk. Something happens to his eyes. They ain't very friendly anymore.

  "You t'ink you can buy de black mon for a ten-dollar bill?"

  "I just want you to let me go back and see my friend without bothering the whole establishment."

  "I could lose my job I let you go wanderin' aroun' on your own."

  I take out another ten and marry it to the one already on the desk.

  "I should be insulted you offer me money, but I got to t'ink you don' know no better. What kind of employee would I be if I tol' you to break de rules? What kind of employee would dat make me?"

  He drops his comic book on the floor and bends hisself in half reaching for it. "Now, where in de hell dat funny book go?" he says.

  I hurry on down the corridor and make the left. I go past some French doors to a dining room. I stop and sneak a look around the door frame. I see there's only a few patients eating in there. All the rest of the people having lunch look like staff. Miss Evergreen is sitting with a man with gray hair who's got his back to me. She glances up, and I duck back.

  I go on down the hall and find Delvin's room. I knock on the door to warn him somebody's coming, and I go right in. He ain't in his bed. He's sitting in one of these high chairs with wheels, which Mary tells me is a geriatric chair, staring out the closed window at the garden. But from the look on his face I don't think he even sees the garden.

  The smell of neglect and unwashed feet and pee fills my nose. There's a lunch tray sitting on the table next to him. The food on the plate is drying around the edges, and it don't smell too good, either.

  I say hello and should I open the window. He don't even let on that I'm in the room while I try to open the window and let in a little air. The window's stuck and won't even budge.

  "Ought to tell them to get the maintenance man up here, unstick this window," I say.

  Delvin's eyelids flicker a little bit, but that's all I get.

  I pull his chair around so he's facing me when I sit on the bed. "We had a spill down around Eckersall Stadium," I say. "Some kind of waste, salty as hell. Thought for a while there it could be toxic. Guess what we find out it is?"

  Delvin just stares past my shoulder at the wall. I pat him on the cheek like he's a baby, I'm trying to get its attention, and he finally focuses his eyes on me.

  "So, anyway, we go down around the reclamation plant. Have a little look around. Trace it back. What do you think? There's this old factory used to make pickles. Been closed—I don't know—ten years. Nobody in the building for ten years. There's these gigantic vats where they cure the pickles. Hooked up one after the other. So, what do you think? Ten years ago they forget or don't bother to empty them when they close the doors. Brine eats through the outlet valves one after the other. Whammo! They all let go and spill a couple thousand gallons of the saltiest water in Chicago right into the sewers. Ain't that something?"

  He opens his mouth and moves his jaw up and down. For a minute I think he's going to say something. But all he wants is some water.

  When I fill up a plastic cup from a plastic pitcher on the bedside table and hold it for him while he drinks, I can see he ain't wearing his dentures. Just one tooth in his bottom jaw sticks up like a broken tusk. I wonder why a person would leave just one tooth in his mouth that way, but I suppose it's like a sign of youth and strength and he don't want to let it go.

  "Hey, Chips, what's going on here?" I say. "What've they done to you?"

  The door opens up, and Evergreen walks in with a tall guy, around fifty, right behind her. It's the gray-haired character she was having lunch with.

  "Mr. Flannery," she says, almost managing to duck her tongue. "What do you think you're doing in here?"

  "I'm here to see how my friend is doing, and it don't look to me like he's doing too good."

  "He's been sedated. He had a restless night, and at his age, especially in his weakened condition, sleep is essential. I don't suppose a doctor's ever told you that people—especially older people—are particularly vulnerable to all sorts of illness after suffering a tragedy?"

  "I don't know if keeping him zonked out is the way to build up his health," I say, getting off the bed and going around Delvin's chair to face her.

  "Don't you think that should be left up to the medical experts?" the man says.

  "Are you a medical expert?"

  He smiles like he's amused at the notion and shakes his head as though I've said something very witty. "I trust them, though," he says, in this superior way.

  "Well, see, I don't necessarily do. I don't trust the kind of care they provide around here, either. So I'm not talking about medical theories. I'm talking about a hot room with a window what won't open and an old man what stares out the window without seeing anything and smells like he ain't been washed in three days."

  Evergreen pulls herself up like she's ready to call me outside to fight it out. "Mr. Flannery," she says, biting my name off like the name was my head, "how would you like it if I came down to your office and asked you why the floor wasn't swept or the walls painted or a broken valve was lying on your desk in the middle of your paperwork? How'd you like it if you were working one place and I came along and asked you why you weren't taking care of something someplace else? How'd you like it if I give you a hard time when you was in the middle of your goddamn work, trying to make what you had stretch to do three times the work?"

  While she's giving me hell her language changes. She starts off lecturing me like an educated person and ends up telling me off like somebody from the Back of the Yards.

  "Come in and volunteer your time, Flannery. Get the state to cough up a little more money for the welfare patients and tell them to stop dumping mentals on us claiming they're just old. Get me a budget so I can pay my staff a decent wage."

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20