The Old Neighborhood - Bill Hillmann

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of it. My heart banged in my ears. Across the half-empty parking lot, the Assyrian disappeared through the front door of the pharmacy, with Lil Pat and Mickey close behind. The laughter rose to high hilarity. As we approached the pharmacy, I heard the screams from inside, but no gun shot. We stood there at the open door as the neon-green light from the sign in the window poured out and stained the sidewalk at our feet. We peered in at the long rows of shelving units that ran back to the counter; there wasn’t a soul in sight, just the screams and a deep, leaden crunching. Then, the sound dampened. The laughter plummeted to a bubbling, demonic gurgle. There was a blur of motion. Ryan grabbed my arm and pulled me toward another doorway. We crammed in and pressed our backs to the glass door. Lil Pat emerged from the drug store with Mickey right behind him. Their laughter fizzled into a popping giggle. Their hands were as red as butchers’ to the forearms, and there was a bulge in Lil Pat’s blood-speckled waistband. As they jogged out, Lil Pat’s shirt rose up above his belt, and I saw the wet wooden pistol grip. They glanced up and down Clark Street, wild-eyed, and then hung a left and disappeared into the darkness of the side street.

      The screaming continued inside. It was a woman’s voice, and it was the only voice that could be heard. There was a quick panting between each scream. I listened as I hid there with Ryan beside me. Our chests heaved. The patter of Lil Pat and Mickey’s steps dissipated. We entered the drug store wordless. The woman screamed like she was falling into an endless, black abyss, it rang in my ears. Trembling, we walked towards it. I saw the dark-red puddle on the floor slowly expanding like a shadow across the green and grey tiles. I walked closer to the puddle’s edge where I saw the young man motionless—eyes still open. A deep crack above his eye ran up his forehead and into his hair. Thick blood oozed slowly from the wound, wetting his frizzy black hair. His bottom jaw hung open and was cocked to the side of his narrow, dark face like it had been dislodged from its hinge. The woman screamed deeper into the abyss, crumpled on the ground with the phone trembling in her hand. Her torso shook terribly. The puddle enveloped her legs and soaked the underside of her brown nylons. I looked at them in silent mourning—for the young man and something that I hadn’t words for. We slipped out of the store as others poured in through the doorway.

      We walked towards home in the quiet—our heads hung. The weight of it all around us. The air was thick, and the carnival roared on in the distance. The sound of the children’s joyous screams rose and fell, but I had no urge to return. We walked down Clark to Hollywood Ave., where the yellow sign of the corner store glowed stale and flickered. We stood there under it a while.

      “You think dey’re gonna get caught up?” I asked.

      “Naw, there ain’t nobody gonna rat dem out.”

      “Shit… He was dead wadn’t he.”

      Ryan didn’t answer. We walked down and crossed Ashland with the sirens floating in the air. Ryan went his way to the north, and I went home. I went up to my room and sat on the bed a while in the dark as the orange-yellow of the streetlight seeped in through the window. I thought about God. I thought about heaven and if Lil Pat could ever go there now. I wondered if I could go there now that I knew what I knew and was never gonna tell. I held my crucifix and prayed to Jesus that he wasn’t dead. After the others had gone to sleep, I went downstairs to the TV room and watched the reports of the murder.

      And that was the birth of Pistol Pat.

      •

      WHEN I WAS A LITTLE KID, all I ever wanted to be was the baddest kid on the block. At least that’s what I thought I longed for; deep down, all I wanted was for my family to stay together, but I didn’t find that out ’til later.

      My Ma got pregnant with Lil Pat when she was thirteen and the old man was fourteen, and they had to go down to Tennessee to get married ’cause at their age it was illegal in the State of Illinois.

      The far North Side was a strange place back then. Uptown and Edgewater were full of hillbillies from West Virginia who came looking for work, found it, and stayed. Their hillbilly family vendettas came with them. Rifle volleys resounded over Sheridan Ave. from one low-rent high-rise to the next. Folk music flourished. John Prine, Steve Goodman, Fred Holstein—all of them spewed out of the North Side of Chicago.

      At first, my family lived on the second floor of my grandmother’s two-flat. It was right there on Olive Ave. in-between Ashland and Hermitage Ave. in the St. Greg’s Parish. The old man had evolved from street thug, to car thief, to cat burglar, to repo man. In other words, he’d gone pro. And Ma was babysitting. They had three raccoons and a fox as pets. Then, they had Blake. He was a sick baby—had a heart defect—but don’t worry, he grew up to be probably the biggest and strongest of the brothers. Richard was born a couple years later, and everybody said, “Look at the size of the feet on that kid! He’s gonna be a giant!” but he never broke six feet.

      Ma started to worry that my Dad was only gonna give her boys, and she really wanted a little girl. So she thought of adoption, but DCFS was already breathing down her neck because she was running an illegal babysitting outfit out of the apartment, though the only thing illegal was that she had too many kids. What DCFS didn’t understand was that Ma was really good at taking care of ten to twelve kids at a time, in addition to her own.

      She’d read an article in the Trib about adoption and found out that you could adopt kids from third world countries really easy. She and my old man looked into it and started saving. Next thing you know, they’re on a flight to Puerto Rico to change planes and head to the Dominican Republic to adopt a little girl.

      My Dad had earned himself quite a reputation as a tough guy in quite a tough neighborhood at quite a tough time in Chicago. Well, he ends up in the pisser at the airport in Puerto Rico, and he says when he walked in there was a uniformed cop standing at the door. So there he is pissing at a urinal when three “Spanish guys” (they weren’t from Spain, though) walk in and step up behind him in this empty bathroom. Pin-prickles dance up his back and neck. The three of them stood in complete silence behind him, though all the other urinals were open. Dad figured they weren’t gonna wait for him to finish, so he didn’t wait either. With his thang hanging out in mid-stream, he spun around on them. He said he’d never kicked anyone in the face harder in his whole life, which means something because he had a long, storied history of kicking people very hard in the face. At the end, he grabbed the last of them by the head and broke the porcelain urinal with the guy’s cheekbone. When Dad walked out, the cop at the door had evaporated. Interpol grabbed him, and my Ma didn’t know where the hell he was ’cause he didn’t inform her that he was going to the john.

      Anyway, somehow they made it to the Dominican Republic. An adoption agent took them miles inland along winding dirt roads to a tiny village full of huts. They literally lived in a shack made of scrap metal and salvaged wood with chickens and lizards running around on the dirt floor. The girl’s family was comprised of thirteen children from two fathers—the first had passed. My parents went for the infant, but the birth mother urged them to also take the second-youngest in the belief that her children would get a chance at a better life in America. The negotiation took place as giant, black hornets swooped in to kill the tarantulas. The second-youngest was a little girl about to turn three, and somehow Ma convinced Dad, so they came home with not one but two little, dark-brown, frizzy-haired angels. They named the youngest Rose and the older one Jan, but they’d forever be known as Jan’n’Rose and have their names be confused by all of our family, even though Rose was much lighter skinned and taller than Jan, who was dark and small-framed with a fiery temper. I came into the picture about a year later. A “late-in-life baby” my Ma always said, but she was just twenty-seven. It was a different time.

      •

      LIL PAT BECOMING A MURDERER didn’t spark off out of the blue. We could feel it coming—in the family and in the neighborhood.

      The TJOs sprouted up in Edgewater in the ’60s. The original name was the “Thorndale Jarvis Organization.” They were a fairly organized stone greaser gang that hung out right under the Thorndale stop on the Red Line directly across from the huge dark brick armory where I took gymnastics as a little boy. Their real estate ran between there and the Jarvis stop on the Red Line. Under the leadership of Joe Ganci and Bob Kellas, the gang flourished,

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