Chicago Noir

All happy families by Andrew Ervin

Canal & Jackson

I am riding backwards on the Ann Rutledge, otherwise known as the Amtrak 304 originating out of Kansas City. I boarded in Normal, Illinois from where we departed precisely at 5:03 as scheduled. Pleasant enough ride I guess if you discount the possibility of any number of law enforcement professionals waiting for me at Union Station. They could also climb onboard at any of the five stops along the way. Shit. Local statutes require the engineer to blow the train horn more or less continuously and some college-age hottie a couple seats up is hollering into her cell phone. It frequently amazes me how few people possess even the slightest inclination toward common decency. I am writing you this letter in a composition book made by the Top Flight Co. of Chattanooga, Tennessee. It has a stitched binding, not glued, and a heavy stock cardboard cover with a black-and-white marble pattern. 100 Sheets Wide Rule. Of course this is a nonsmoking train, which I am forced to admit is beginning to cause me some small degree of consternation. Over two more hours until I get back to Chicago. Reds are in town tonight. Zambrano’s first pitch at 7:05. He’s currently 15-8, and his 2.64 earned run average makes him our most effective starter this year. Better even than Maddux or Prior or Wood. Without any unforeseen delays a twenty-minute cab ride from the station will have me kicked back with an Old Style by the start of the fourth. It is reasonable to expect the Cubs will already be losing by a significant margin. It is my belief that the long-term effect of noise pollution is something we are not yet able to comprehend. Approaching Pontiac now. The night we met you stabbed me with a sharpened No. 2 pencil. It happened halfway through the first meeting of our Russian lit seminar and I had to excuse myself to go to the men’s room to inspect the damage. You were crying when I returned. We had never said more than one or two words to each other but I agreed to let you buy me a beer after class. Less than a month later you moved in. I never learned if the stabbing was accidental. Despite the huge production the press is going to make out of this thing it wasn’t such a huge deal. You hear about these small heists, five grand here, seven grand there, but that’s bullshit. I bagged eighteen thou and change once at a particular lending institution down in Champaign, but in the newspaper article the branch manager admitted just two. That kind of shit used to bother me; I know better now. His picture was in the paper looking all tough. Same dude that damn near pissed his pants. But it’s in his best interest to lowball the figure so as to not send the public into a panic and to discourage future would-be perpetrators like me. Those university towns are the best. Big transient population, all the kids dress the same. Normal was the obvious choice. I showed up a few hours early just to walk around a bit, get some coffee and the lay of the land. At the campus bookstore I bought a red, adjustable baseball cap ($14.99) and a red windbreaker ($34.99), both of which were emblazoned with the university’s pissed-off looking cardinal logo, along with this notebook (99¢) and a Sanford Uniball Grip pen ($1.29), which doesn’t write very smoothly at all. My hope of course is that the FBI has bigger things on their minds right now than a hit in some bunghole town. This was my third job and I think it’s my last. Shit. Let’s just say I had no reason to expect things to get fucked up this bad. I wish she’d shut the hell up. Going into a weekend series with Prior and Wood on the hill we should be able to expect a sweep, but we lost two out of three to the Mets of all goddamn teams and are now just a half game ahead of San Francisco for the wild card. We are pretty much fucked. Christ a cigarette would be right on time. Dwight. No one on the platform thankfully. Not enough time to jump out. One long glorious puff, that’s all I want. Ann Mays Rutledge worked in her father’s tavern in New Salem, Illinois, where Abraham Lincoln stayed for some time. According to several accounts he fell madly in love with Ann but she was already engaged to a local landowner, John MacNamar, formerly of upstate New York, who left New Salem on business never to return. Illinois State University is home to Waterson Tower, which at twenty-eight stories ranks as the tallest university dormitory in the world. Vestibule on the ground floor has a white emergency phone. I tell 911 that my room is packed with explosives and if I get another bad grade on a psychology test I’m going to set it off. Hang up, smoke a cigarette. Then it’s fire trucks, ambulances, the yellow tape. The bank’s a block away, back toward the station. Baker’s the worst goddamn manager in the game. We had the best young staff in the league. Kerry Wood gets his elbow taken apart and put back together like it’s fuckin Legos. Last season he threw an average of 109.9 pitches per game and went 141 on one occasion. Just this season he threw 131 on April 17. Most of the tellers are outside trying to figure out what all the noise is about. They’re wearing billowy, cream-colored blouses and multiple cheap gold necklaces. Only a couple kids in the place, depositing what appears to be an excessively large bundle of bills. It used to be that you could tell just from the look of someone if he was packing. Now everybody’s got guns. The fucking college kids got guns now. I walk up all smiles and lift the front of my new windbreaker to show her the handle of the .22 slid into my jeans. Her name plaque says DONNA. Something’s genuinely fucked up about the state of the world when we got college kids who feel the need to carry firearms. Joliet, knock on wood. Killing me this year, I swear. You’d think Baker would get his head out of his ass. Tommy John surgery, that’s what they call it. In 1974, Doctor Frank Jobe of Los Angeles, California treated Tommy John’s torn ulnar collateral ligament by extracting an accessory tendon from the pitcher’s right, non-throwing arm and then weaving it around his left elbow using holes drilled into the bones. Fifteen minutes to game time. Shit. Almost in Chicago. Union Station was designed by the venerable firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White. Construction started in 1913 and lasted through the war. It’s funny how things happen. On April 29, 1986, Roger Clemens set the all-time Major League record by striking out twenty batters in a single game. The same night, a chain reaction in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant led to an explosion that killed thirty people on the spot, caused the evacuation of 135,000 people within a twenty-mile radius of the plant, and sent a toxic cloud floating across a huge swath of Central Europe. On May 6, 1998, a paying attendance of 15,758 at Wrigley Field watched as Kerry Wood tied Roger Clemens’s record. The same night, you returned home early from class to find one of my undergraduates naked under our bed, then left for Union Station never to return. Summit. No way I expected any trouble in Normal. I go in knowing it’s going to be my last job so I want to make sure to score big. I’ve just had enough, you know? The stress is really something. I wish that bitch would shut the fuck up already. Jesus. Donna does the right thing. She grabs all the money out of her drawer and puts it into three of those heavy-duty zipper bank sacks. Looks like ten to fifteen even if the wads are filled with singles as I suspect. Couple twenties on the outside of each stack. It’s smart. But who knows? Not like I can dump out my backpack on the next seat and count it out. Not till I get home. I drop the sacks inside my shirt. No one can see them with this big jacket on. But here’s where I get stupid. Instead of walking calmly out and getting lost in the crowd outside, I pull my gun on the two college kids. That was a shitload of money they were depositing and I wanted some. Smaller of the two reaches into his armpit. He looks like he’s getting ready to flap his arm to make fart sounds, but instead he draws out this gun way bigger than my little pea shooter. The sound is amazing. Something shatters behind me and this time I’m the one about to piss his pants. Shit. Never ran so fast. Heavy sacks of money bounce against my stomach. I push past the ladies smoking outside, toward the crowd. Throw the baseball cap under a parked car. Christ I hate the fucking Cardinals. Roger Clemens now pitches for the Astros, the team Wood struck out twenty of. Train’s not for another hour, so I have to lay low and the best place to do that is among the mass of evacuated college kids. They’re treating it like a holiday. You wouldn’t believe the way these girls dress nowadays. I think I scored enough to keep me going till some other career path reveals itself. Maybe I’ll try to enroll in grad school again. Union Station has a very unusual setup. The double stub-end tracks allow northbound and southbound trains to arrive at the same spot even if they’re from different railroads. Something to think about. I boxed up your stuff and a month later your father and sister came by one night to throw it all in the back of a pickup truck. There remains the remote possibility there’ll be a couple cops waiting for me on the platform. Unlikely but you never know. Those are the risks. Ann Rutledge finally agreed to marry Abe Lincoln, still a law student at the time, but she died at age twenty-two of typhoid fever. Some accounts say that her death caused the great emancipator-to-be to lapse into a permanent state of melancholia, one that affected the remainder of his illustrious life and career. This fucking curse. 131. I just don’t get it. What the hell was Baker thinking? We could still face the Astros in a one-game playoff. Clemens versus Wood to determine which team makes the playoffs. Shit. We are totally fucked. Your flair for the dramatic was something I truly adored about you. Of course I never expected you to pull an Anna Karenina. Must have been right here somewhere. With trains coming and going both directions these tracks make Union Station, and I guess all of Chicago, a unique kind of crossroads. Doesn’t happen anywhere else in the country. Another reason I admire this city. Sweet home. Shit.