The Old Neighborhood Read Online Free PDF

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.
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    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