Rush hour was over. People were beginning to fill up the restaurants that lined the streets. I felt overwhelmed with envy for the diners I could see through the windows, eating and laughing together. This was what it was like to be Elton, trudging back each night from his station outside the coffee bar on my street, a Vietnam veteran with no home and only the price of a bottle or a sandwich in his pocket.

On leaden feet, I walked under the expressway and turned east and then north again. The railway embankment was surrounded by razor wire, but there was a gap hidden by the Kennedy’s shadow. I slipped through it and crawled up the embankment. Decades of Chicagoans had tossed their garbage from their cars, and, in places along the embankment, it was waist high. I could see the path Elton had carved through the refuse and followed it up to the tracks and down the other side, where the embankment ended at the river’s edge.

I didn’t spot Elton’s shack at first, and wondered if in his paranoia he had misdirected me. However, a faint trail led through the underbrush and refuse, and I followed it to the river. The water here was a thick brownish green. Ducks bobbed in it, along with plastic bottles and sticks. There wasn’t a visible current, and mosquitoes rose in clouds from the thicket of shrubs that lined the bank.

From the river’s edge, I looked back and finally saw the shack, almost invisible against the underbrush and discarded tires. It had a faded logo from the C&NW railroad on it; I suppose they’d once used it for storage. As I got closer, I saw Elton had put a rain barrel on the roof and fixed up a showerhead. There weren’t any windows in the shack, and the boards it was built with were gray-black with damp, but he had covered any holes with a variety of metal, Styrofoam, and plastic sheeting.

I clambered up the embankment and made my way around to the side where the door was. “Elton? You home? It’s V. I. Warshawski. We need to talk.”

I rapped smartly on the panel and heard a movement from inside the shack, an intake of a sob. I pulled open the ramshackle door. My cousin Petra blinked at me from a nest of sleeping bags.

“Vic! How did you know? Who told you? Who’s with you?”

I couldn’t speak. I was so overcome with relief at the sight of Petra that I just stood there, shaking my head in wonder.

47 - A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT

47

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT

I WAS ON THE FLOOR, HOLDING PETRA, WHILE SHE SOBBED against my shoulder. “Vic, I’m so scared, it’s so awful, don’t yell at me. I didn’t mean … I didn’t want—”