Back in the car, as I headed over to the Ryan to go to South Chicago, I said, “I don’t know what you really wanted back there, but don’t try it again on South Houston. My old house is smack in the heart of gang territory. We could get shot if anyone imagines we’re dissing them. We may get hassled just for being Anglo women nosing around the block. Okay?”

“Okay,” Petra muttered, picking at a loose thread on her jeans.

22 - A SCARY SIDEWALK

22

A SCARY SIDEWALK

WE RODE THE EXPRESSWAY SOUTH IN SILENCE. PETRA KEPT her head studiously turned to the window, looking at the old slag heaps and collapsing bungalows without comment.

This had always been a rough part of town. But when the mills were filling the landscape with clouds of toxic dust, most people had good jobs. Now those mills are as dead and gone as the cattle that used to pour through the stockyards. Most people in South Chicago lucky enough to find work are pulling minimum wage at the fast-food joints or the big By-Smart warehouse on 103rd Street.

Unemployment rates have stood at over twenty-five percent for more than two decades down here, and street crime usually involves more than one gun. Skirting potholes big enough to swallow a flatbed truck, I pulled up in front of the house on Houston where I’d grown up.

“This is it.” I tried to sound jaunty.

I couldn’t carry it off: The leaded-glass transom above the front door was still there, but two of the little glass diamond prisms were missing. The prisms had made Gabriella feel she wasn’t living in just another shabby bungalow but a house with some distinction to it. She and I polished the glass every month and scrubbed the iron dust from the frame around it.

I pointed to the porthole window in the attic. “That was my room. I used to watch the street from up there, when I wasn’t driving my mother crazy being out in the middle of the action.”

Petra looked at me doubtfully. “What did you do?”

“My cousin Boom-Boom … Actually, he’s your cousin, too. Your dad talk about him? Boom-Boom was a hockey star, but he was murdered a dozen years or so ago. He and I used to jump off the barrier into Lake Calumet to swim in the summer or we skated on it in the winter. It’s where he practiced his slap shot. I fell through a hole in the ice one winter, and the main thing we were both scared of was that Gabriella would find out. We used to climb the girders on the El to ride up to Wrigley Field if we didn’t have money for carfare. Then we’d shinny up the ivy behind the bleachers and sneak into the park for nothing.”