Painted Cities

CHILDHOOD

I grew up on Eighteenth Street and Throop, in the heart of Chicago. To the east, beyond the Dan Ryan Expressway, beyond the steeple of Providence of God Church, and beyond the no-man’s land that was the “darkside,” a stretch of neighborhood laced with forgotten Illinois-Continental railroad tracks and collapsing smokestacks, a place said to be inhabited by the most ruthless Mexican street gang in Chicago, the Villa Lobos, was the lake. To the north were the Puerto Ricans, who were rumored to surpass the Villa Lobos in ruthlessness, said to be willing to shoot you in front of a church or in front of family, sins the Mexican gangs swore against. And then beyond them, farther north, were the whites, in a dreamland accessible only by the Chicago L, and even at that a place you glimpsed momentarily — redbrick houses, wrought-iron fences, tree-lined streets — then left, swallowed by the subway if you were on the Douglas-Park B, or forced to watch it all fade from view if you rode the elevated Ravenswood A.

The blacks were to the south. They were unfathomables. Things we didn’t understand went on down there. Killings were indiscriminate. And to the west was the sunset, that’s all I ever knew about the west, when evening would come and the sun would hit that point at the horizon where it flared up the long neon glass corridor of Eighteenth Street as if each panaderia, taco joint, and tavern had caught fire. Then, minutes later, the miracle would disappear, and up and down Eighteenth Street the kids who had lined up for blocks were left to wonder if the sun’s sole purpose was to torture them with a paradise they would never reach.

We called this the Revelation. We’d named the event as kids, when Rogelio Ramirez, who grew up with the rest of us on Throop Street, began reading the Bible and reciting from the Book of Revelation as the sun set. He’d stand on the corner stoop of Trebol’s tavern, Bible open in his left hand, drawing exclamation points in the air with his right. “The Woman and the Dragon!” Rogelio would say. “The Fall of Babylon!” Occasionally, the men going into the tavern would stop and listen, as if contemplating the passages Rogelio read, but something in them always snapped, and they’d break into laughter and call Rogelio “The Pope” or “The Saint of Throop Street.” Rogelio never cared. He’d simply raise his voice even higher, bring his arm down even harder. Eventually, the men would retreat into the smoky darkness of Trebol’s, the thick black door sweeping shut behind them. The small diamond of mirrored glass at its center staring down at us as if a horde of curious drunks were peering out from behind it. When the sun dropped below the horizon, Rogelio would snap his Bible shut, turn on his heels, and march back down Throop Street, like a leader into flames.

When we were in the sixth grade, Rogelio’s mother began sleeping with Rowdy, an old Racine-Boy who lived above Sergio and Jorge Naveretté, two brothers in our group and expert spies who had devised an ingenious method by which to hear the sex going on above them.

“Check it out, bro,” Sergio said the morning after he revealed the secret to me. He turned and began walking up his apartment building’s stairs. That morning I had met him early for school, looking to hear Ms. Ramirez’s lovemaking for myself.

Sergio stepped into his living room, past his kitchen whose boiling pots of water always made that side of the house seem more like a rainforest than a place where people lived and ate. He led me around the corner into the small bedroom he shared with his brother. There on the bed, lying on his side, was Jorge, holding a long row of paper-towel rolls taped end-to-end to his ear. The other end was up on the ceiling, inserted through a hole for a missing light fixture.

“Jorge,” Sergio said. “Let Jesse see.” Jorge’s eyes were closed, his eyebrows raised in soft arches. He was ten at the time, a year younger than Sergio and me, but with his head to the side, his eyes closed the way they were, he seemed even younger, like the Christmas ornaments my mother had of baby angels sleeping.

“Jorge,” Sergio said again. And Jorge opened his eyes but made no move to get up. Instead, he continued to listen to the cardboard contraption, alternating his gaze between our faces as if what he saw was beyond us, beyond the walls of the tiny bedroom he and his brother shared.

“Jorge!” Sergio said again. And Jorge snapped out of whatever spell he was under. He leaped from the bed. “Damn, bro!” he said. “They’re doing it doggie-style!” He sounded out of breath, excited. I took the tube and nodded, knowing from the Penthouses Sergio and Jorge kept beneath their dresser exactly what “doggie-style” was.

On the other side of the small apartment, amid the cloud of humidity I had seen swirling when I passed, were Sergio and Jorge’s parents. Though I lived just across the street, I had really seen Sergio and Jorge’s parents only twice in my life, once at our confirmation, at our grammar school, Providence of God, and once when a disgruntled former tenant set their apartment building on fire. Otherwise their parents hardly seemed to exist at all, disappearing into doorways, driving off in their green pickup, always slipping just out of view. Whenever I walked into Sergio and Jorge’s apartment and saw the swirling steam of their kitchen, I wondered if their parents were actually in there, or if they hid from their children the way they seemed to hide from everyone else.

Love affairs were a fact of life in my neighborhood. What Ms. Ramirez was doing was not that extraordinary. Stories abounded of mothers who had left their families to live with truck drivers from Texas or journeyman housepainters. And Mr. Gomez, downstairs in my building, had been seeing a barmaid at Trebol’s tavern for years. Everyone knew about it, knew Mrs. Gomez knew about it. She would send her youngest son, Peter, to fetch his father from the barmaid’s apartment atop the tavern. No one ever said anything.

But Ms. Ramirez was religious. Her husband had left her the year before and she had turned to the church, Rogelio in tow. When the Virgin Mary processions came singing up the street, carting the porcelain three-foot statue of La Virgen to the sin-afflicted apartments of the neighborhood, Ms. Ramirez was in the lead. She had inherited from the most devout before her the task of deciding how long the Virgin was to sit in the various accursed households; sometimes it stayed for weeks on end. And behind her, carrying the candles and crucifixes of the procession, the fifteen or so other neighborhood women followed like apostles. They had all lost something — sons to drive-bys, unwed daughters to pregnancies and flight-of-fancy elopements — but Ms. Ramirez had lost a husband. And though the list of things-to-weather went on for miles in my neighborhood, deserting husbands sat at the top.

“All right,” Jorge instructed. “Now push it up till you hit the floor.” I raised my head as Jorge worked the other end of the tube deeper into the hole. Sprinkles of dry plaster cascaded down upon the side of my face, into my eye, as I held the tube to my ear. Abruptly the tube hit flush. Sergio and Jorge looked to me. I wasn’t sure what to listen for. What did doggie-style sound like? Then, without warning, unmistakable sounds began pouring down the tube. I heard the squeak of old bedsprings. I heard the scrape of bedposts against wood flooring. Most remarkable of all, I heard the voice of Rogelio’s mother, who just the day before had asked me how I was doing in school but who was now moaning out “Rowdy,” softly, quietly, as if sorry for something, grateful for something else.

I looked to Sergio.

“I told you, bro!” he said. “I told you she was up there!” I didn’t say a word. Instead, I listened more closely, able now to pick up even fainter sounds, the rocking of an off-kilter night table, the groans of Rowdy himself, whose voice here was smooth and easy, different from when he was out front drinking, cursing in ways we remembered and used on our own.

I couldn’t tell whether they were doing it doggie-style or any style. I only pictured in motion the Penthouse scenes Sergio had begun flashing before me like cue cards. I closed my eyes.

The heaves of Rogelio’s mother began closing in on each other. The groans of Rowdy got louder. I imagined Ms. Ramirez sweating, her mouth open, her tongue pushed against her upper teeth like the women in the magazines. I imagined her nude but for the red heels she often wore to work. And in my imagination her shoes glowed red, radiating as if with heat in the steam-filled room.

“Ohh,” Ms. Ramirez suddenly gasped. I opened my eyes.

“Let me see!” Sergio said. I didn’t respond. Sergio put his magazine on the dresser and sat next to me. He placed his ear close to mine at the end of the tube. On my right side, Jorge did the same, a triangle of eavesdroppers.

“All right,” Sergio said. “He’s about to climax.”

And then there was a quick trade of punches. Ms. Ramirez called out to God; Rowdy grunted; the rocking turned to a rumble, the scrapes to digs. Then there was a yell, and in that split second Rowdy’s voice was thick and heavy, the way it sounded out front when he called someone a punk-ass motherfucker and was about to prove it. Silence followed, then a soft thump. I held tight to the tube, listening for any aftermath. Sergio rose from the bed and bowed like a matador to the four corners of the tiny bedroom. Jorge whistled softly in applause.

“Man,” Sergio said as we walked to the corner of Eighteenth and Throop, our notebooks in hand, “they were all over today. Usually they’re just quiet.”

“Must’ve been horny,” I said. “She always yell for God like that?”

“All the time,” Sergio said. “She’s going to hell.” He blessed himself and laughed.

At the corner Jorge took a seat on Trebol’s stoop as Sergio and I looked up the block for Rogelio and Marcitos. Up and down Eighteenth Street, the morning delivery trucks worked their horns to announce their backing into docks. The early mist had not yet burned off the neighborhood. The smell of yesterday’s fried food, tacos, gorditas, chicharon, hung in the air. Soon the sun would burn the haze away and allow a fresh day’s worth of fried-food smell to settle over the neighborhood. Up the block, Rogelio and Marcitos came out of their buildings. Marcitos, carrying a single spiral notebook like the rest of us; Rogelio, carrying his books and Bible in a small brown briefcase. Marcitos crossed Throop and met Rogelio. They approached us.

Providence was marooned on the darkside, forgotten among abandoned factories, outmoded railroad lines, and dilapidated wood-frame houses. I’m sure those in the neighborhood who didn’t know Providence of God was back there — it was small, like any other three-flat — wondered every morning where all the kids were going, disappearing into the maze of decaying brick buildings, following the train tracks as if we were ghosts of a life that might once have existed there. We even felt like ghosts sometimes, in the winter, when the sound of our footsteps was muffled by snow, when even our breathing seemed swallowed by the thick air. In the spring, when it rained, we huddled beneath the train docks and examined the vast innards of the factories — the huge chutes that hung like descending missile silos, the conveyers that led off into distances we never had guts enough to explore. When the rain stopped, we crossed back over the railroad lines and became real again, our walks like transformations.

“Hey, bro,” Sergio said as Rogelio passed us, assuming his usual position at the head of the pack. “Your mom leave for work early this morning?”

I cringed.

“She goes to work early now,” Rogelio said, not turning around to look, his briefcase bouncing off his skinny leg. “I told you last week.” Behind us Jorge and Marcitos, who were the same age, settled into their morning discussion about the previous day’s episode of Spectreman. Marcitos still had a black-and-white TV and it was Jorge’s duty to update him on anything he might have missed.

His blood is blue, bro. Everyone knows that.

For real, damn, I thought I saw some orange coming through.

Sergio stroked his chin.

“She must like working, huh?” he asked. Sergio elbowed me in the arm. Rogelio didn’t answer.

We neared Saint Procopius, our school’s competing parish. Morning sunlight exploded through the church, casting the reds and blues of the stained-glass windows onto the sidewalk below. As Rogelio passed the front doors, he blessed himself, forming a cross with his thumb and forefinger and tracing miniature crucifixes on his forehead, mouth, and chest. He kissed his thumb to heaven. In imitation, we all did the same.

“Hey,” Sergio said. “How about if your mother was seeing some other guy?”

“She wouldn’t see another guy,” Rogelio said. “She’s got the Lord.” He raised a finger to heaven.

“I know, I know,” Sergio said. “Everyone’s got the Lord, but say you found out she was with some other guy. Maybe you came home and found her on the floor, maybe in bed—” Sergio was looking to the sky, imagining scenarios, sexual positions. He didn’t see Rogelio whirl around, his briefcase flaring out at his side.

“Don’t talk about my mother!” Rogelio said. He pointed a finger in Sergio’s face. “Don’t talk about things you don’t know about.” Rogelio was much shorter and skinnier than Sergio, but he held his finger right off the tip of Sergio’s nose. Sergio didn’t move. Rogelio turned and began walking again.

“Damn, cuz,” Sergio called out after Rogelio. “Don’t worry about me. I know what I’m talking about.” Rogelio simply continued walking.

Sergio laughed and brushed himself off. He blessed himself, held up a cross of forefingers, then marched forward.

We turned down Sangamon Street. Sets of railroad tracks, the dividing line between the darkside and the realside, ran down the center. More kids had begun filling in our side of the sidewalk, all of us waiting until we got to Eighteenth Place, the street our school was on, to cross over. Our school bully, Gustavo Rivera, a large kid with sweat glands that poured like waterfalls, walked on our side as well, torturing smaller kids with “the wedge,” what he called the Saturday-afternoon-wrestling move with which he crushed tiny first-grader heads between his chunky hands.

Across the tracks, only Pepe Ordoñez, Paco Martinez, and Jeremy Witek walked the darkside. We called them the Lost Boys. They had been walking the darkside for as long as anyone could remember, breaking factory windows, smoking, spray-painting unfamiliar gang signs on the crumbling railroad docks. Rumor had it they were orphans, that they lived among the ruins of the darkside like animals, like the Villa Lobos, who for some reason, maybe respect, never seemed to mind the Lost Boys on their territory. The Lost Boys were eighth-graders. They had been held back two years or more and were actually old enough to be in high school.

“I heard Paco and Pepe were in the Audy Home for stealing cars,” Marcitos said from behind us. “That they got butt-raped in there and that’s why they went crazy.”

“Who told you that?” Sergio asked.

“Mona Colón, downstairs,” Marcitos said. Mona was a high-school girl who lived beneath him, one whom we collectively lusted after because at her age she didn’t seem that far out of reach. Paco was said to have gone out with Mona. Some even said that he had had sex with her. And at the time this seemed to have something to do with his ability to walk the darkside. We figured Jeremy and Pepe had had sex with Mona as well, or with the other high-school girls who stood on the corners smoking cigarettes, wearing tight black pants and thick black eyeliner and purple lipstick. The older we got, the more we wanted to be with them, have them hanging off our shoulders the way girlfriends in our neighborhood did. We imagined French-kissing them among the collapsed rafters of the burned-out factories we had always been so afraid of.

The three Lost Boys mounted an abandoned train dock and climbed through a half-fallen brick wall into one of the factories. Up and down Sangamon Street, the kids of Providence looked on in wonder, except for Rogelio, who walked with tunnel vision a half block ahead of us, and Gustavo Rivera, who reached for the head of another unsuspecting first-grader.

At Eighteenth Place, we crossed over the tracks, walked one more block in total silence, then went our separate ways, Marcitos and Jorge to their fifth-grade classroom, Sergio and I to the sixth, and Rogelio to the sacristy of Providence of God Church, where he took prayer sessions before the beginning of every school day.

There had been a time before the Revelation readings, before Ms. Ramirez led processions, before the briefcase, when Rogelio was one of us. Back then his father was still around, and on our way home from school we would see him on the corner sometimes, talking with his partners. Rogelio would run up to him like a good son and his father would pick him up and whirl him around like a good father. Then he’d give Rogelio money and we’d cross the street to Paul’s Drug Store, where we’d buy Slim Jims and Cokes, which we then consumed on the broken concrete steps of the Dvorak Park public pool, pretending we were rich, smoking thin cigars, downing dark champagne.

We only ever knew his father from these scenes and the few things Rogelio had told us — how his father was rich, owned oil wells in Texas, had stock in Shell Oil. We all lied about our families. Sergio said his father was a millionaire cattle breeder in Mexico. I said my family had houses in California, that we could see the Hollywood sign from our backyards, some with better views of the sign than others. After hearing Rogelio’s lie, Sergio began telling kids at school that his father had stock in Shell Oil too. In the court-yard, when the girls asked me or Rogelio if what Sergio said was true, we always said it was, that all three of our fathers had stock in Shell Oil, that our families were part owners and that we all split profits. When asked why we weren’t living in the mansions we claimed to have, we pounded our chests the way the gangbangers did and claimed it was the neighborhood. That we had family here, even the people we didn’t like. And those listening always nodded in understanding.

Those days were full of talk. Talk about our favorite team, the Chicago White Sox, and the hated Chicago Cubs. Talk about where we wanted to visit when we got older: Alaska, Yellowstone Park, places we had researched in our school’s only set of encyclopedias, which were guarded by our school’s secretary, Ms. Margaret, in the main office. We talked about running away. Rogelio had mentioned his aunt who lived in Aurora. Aurora sounded like a nice place and I told Rogelio if he wanted to go I would go with him. Sergio laughed at us for thinking we would ever run away, and when we thought about it more, we knew he was right, and became embarrassed for thinking so childishly.

But Rogelio changed after his father left. In the beginning it was just the Revelation readings, which were fun because for a while we thought Rogelio was joking, the way he wrinkled his brow, the way he moved his arm stiff and strong. But then he started going to church even on Saturdays, our baseball days, our football days. He had become an altar boy and had to stay after school for practice. In the mornings he stopped going straight to class and instead showed up somewhere around third period, having missed most of the morning praying back in the sacristy. And finally, when we did talk to him, Rogelio talked about things we didn’t care about, religious things: You know that Brother Adam went to Providence when it was all Polish? Little by little Rogelio became someone else, someone we didn’t know except for what we remembered.

We continued listening to Rogelio’s mother. I showed up at my usual time two days later and found Marcitos there. Sergio had obviously passed word. We divided up the half hour between the four of us, Jorge keeping time on his father’s silver watch. At one point, Ms. Ramirez said, “I love you.” Marcitos was listening.

“She just said, ‘I-love-you,’” Marcitos said, inflecting the couple’s rhythm.

“Let-me-hear,” Sergio said. And they talked like that the rest of the morning. Even to Rogelio, who had become remarkably more distant in the past few days, walking even farther ahead of us, sometimes leaving us altogether.

“Your-mo-ther-still-lea-ving-ear-ly?” Sergio asked as we walked to school.

Rogelio said nothing.

“Hey,” I called out to Rogelio. “Remember they used to call you the Pope? Remember we were going to run away?”

Rogelio didn’t answer. When he passed the doors of Saint Procopius, he blessed himself. In routine, though we were a full city block behind him, we all did the same.

A week later I showed up at Sergio and Jorge’s building and found the front door open. Upstairs, their apartment door was open as well. I stepped in and tiptoed through the creaky living room, past the dripping kitchen. I opened the door to Sergio and Jorge’s room and saw the usuals, Jorge with the watch, Marcitos sitting on the bed, and Sergio with his stack of magazines. But there were three new kids there as well, one with the tube, now bent and velvety, to his ear, and the others on either side of him, watching Sergio flash his Penthouse scenes. I recognized one of the new kids from Morgan Street, a side street we often used on our way home from school. I hadn’t seen him since months before, but his face, especially his eyebrows, which were upturned in a perpetual scowl, had stuck with me as a mark of a person to avoid.

Sergio continued turning pages. “This is Carlos,” he whispered to me, nodding toward the kid with the tube. “And Joseph and Tony.” He took a breath. “I think I’m going to start charging.” He whispered this even quieter. He smiled and gave me a nod like I should agree with him.

“Jesse,” I said, introducing myself to Joseph and Tony. I skipped over the kid with the tube. Tony, the kid I remembered, pounded his fist to his chest two times as I shook his hand. It was Amor, insider gangbanger stuff, done to represent a Nation. Rowdy pounded his chest when he said what’s up to people. He was an old Racine-Boy. But Tony did it obviously, because he was a Morgan-Boy, or if he wasn’t, an older brother was.

“Are they doing it doggie-style?” I asked Carlos.

Carlos opened his eyes, his head still sideways. “How should I know?” he said. And those in the room began laughing.

We took turns. Two minutes each. Jorge keeping track on his father’s Timex.

We went through the order and the tube finally came to me. Ms. Ramirez and Rowdy were talking. I was trying to pick up their whispers, searching for the words I thought people in love might say—love, babies, marriage—but in the crowded bedroom, concentration was difficult. I breathed, put my hand over my open ear, closed my eyes. Still, I heard only the heavy rush of silence, and an occasional echo too distorted to be understood.

“Se fue la Virgen!” somebody cried in Sergio’s gangway. “Dios mio!” A door slammed. The sound of footsteps could be heard between buildings. Sergio stepped to the side window, saving with a finger his place in the Penthouse he was working on. I handed the tube to Tony and went to the window as well. Jorge and Marcitos followed.

Mrs. Gonzalez, the woman who lived in the downstairs apartment, was running up the narrow gangway, yelling that the Virgin had flown away. She turned the corner onto the sidewalk and the three of us shuffled around the end of the bed to the front window. When we arrived, Mrs. Gonzalez’s blue shawl was fluttering out of range. We turned for the living room, where two more windows looked upon the street. Sergio flung his Penthouse onto the bed. Carlos, Joseph, and Tony stayed with the tube.

As we rushed through the bedroom door, Sergio suddenly stopped in his tracks. We stacked up behind each other, my chin jabbing into Sergio’s shoulder and Jorge’s chin into mine. Standing in the sun, at the living room windows, were Sergio and Jorge’s parents. For the first time ever, I saw them up close. At our confirmation, and the time their building had been set on fire, their father had worn a baseball cap. Now he wore no hat at all, and I could see that he was not only bald down the center of his head but that his scalp glowed a bright scarlet like he had some kind of infection. His belly bulged within an old cowboy shirt and his arms seemed longer than they should’ve been: his wrists were visible beyond his shirt cuffs. Their mother stepped closer to us, taking tiny steps, and it occurred to me suddenly that the mother and father were complete opposites. While the father was lanky and bulbous around the waist, the mother was short and compact, muscular looking in the thick brown sweater she wore. She had a full head of gray hair pulled back in a tight braid, like something you might see on a young girl.

“Que estan haciendo?” she asked. When she opened her mouth, silver crowns on her bottom row of teeth caught light. She looked past us through the doorway and into the bedroom. Tony and Joseph still had their ears to the tube. Carlos had his eyes on the watch. Sergio’s magazine was strewn across the bed, its wrinkled and worn centerfold opened up and in clear view.

Her backhand rose like a reflex. It was so fast I felt its breeze as it whizzed past my nose and cracked Sergio square across the left side of his face. Sergio reeled back, bringing up his hands to shield himself. I stepped aside and his mother landed two more smacks, more dense-sounding, to the back of Sergio’s head.

She whirled around, her stiff braid unmoving. “Salganse de mí casa!” she screamed at the three on the bed. Carlos, Joseph, and Tony rose like soldiers, abandoning the tube still wedged in the ceiling, leaving the silver watch lying on the bed. As they passed through the bedroom door they brushed up against the doorjamb, eying the trigger hand of Sergio’s mother.

She turned to me and Marcitos and pointed her short, wrinkled finger in our faces. She told us she was going to have a long talk with our mothers, then stared at us with her flared-up eyes like miniature Revelations. “Sacanse de aquí,” she said to us, and we followed her finger as it turned toward the front door. “Largense a la escuela!” As I stepped into the hallway I saw, through the corner of my eye, Sergio’s father, his scarlet patch boiling, closing in on Sergio and Jorge.

A small crowd had assembled on the front stoop. Mrs. Gonzalez’s daughters, Vilma and Louísa, who already looked like their mother, old and bowlegged, though they were our age, were out there telling Carlos, Joseph, and Tony that during the night the Virgin had disappeared. That they had had it for the past week, trying to sober up their father, and that when they had awoken, the Virgin was gone, the window she had been placed by opened. Their mother, they said, had gone to get Ms. Ramirez up the block.

“She’s upstairs with that guy,” Tony said.

“Who?” said Vilma, stepping closer to Tony.

“Ms. Ramirez, that lady who leads the processions, she’s upstairs with that old Racine-Boy.”

“Ms. Ramirez is up there, Jesse?” Louísa asked me. She grabbed my arm and pulled me close, mashing her thick, immature chest against my arm.

“I don’t know,” I said. I worked my arm free.

“Is it Ms. Ramirez?” Louísa asked, and she stepped close to me again. “Is Sergio up there listening?”

“Not anymore,” I said. She latched onto my arm. Tony and the others laughed. I looked up the street for Rogelio and Mrs. Gonzalez.

Neighbors were out by this time: Pedro, who lived in the other downstairs apartment, just home from his third shift at Ryerson steel, his brown skin coated with a white powder that made you wonder exactly what he did. Bernardo Ruiz, in a metallic-blue housecoat, who lived the next building over and danced evocatively during all the block parties, who everyone knew was gay but who never found trouble for it because he was ours, a member of our block, our gang, was there as well. And some of the more astute procession ladies had arrived also, their pink and green hair curlers seeming to have picked up the potential for controversy like radar. The Gonzalez daughters began calling up the stairwell to Rowdy.

“Rowdy,” Vilma said. “Is Ms. Ramirez up there?”

“Tenemos un emergency,” Louísa added.

I looked for Rogelio again. I figured he would be able to calm everybody down, convince Mrs. Gonzalez that the Virgin hadn’t actually flown away, that someone had simply stolen her, and that, besides, the Virgin was only a statue anyway, and another could be bought at Opal’s Ocultos on Eighteenth Street. But I also knew Rogelio’s mother would be coming down the stairs any minute, that Rogelio would see her and realize we had been up there spying.

By now Sergio, Jorge, and their parents were downstairs, their father with his cap on. Sergio’s face was flush, his eyes glazed over. Jorge, on the other hand, seemed content, as if things, at least for him, could’ve gone worse.

“What’s going on?” Sergio asked softly.

I told him about the Virgin. I told him how Mrs. Gonzalez was trying to find Rogelio’s mother. He looked up the stairs and whispered, “El trutho comes outo.” He rubbed his hands together and smiled. For Rogelio, I nearly punched him.

Mrs. Gonzalez finally came waddling back up Throop Street. The procession regulars from Rogelio’s building followed. She came to us, her lips trembling. She held her fingers to her mouth. Just as she took a breath to speak, a step sounded, and we all turned to look up the apartment building’s stairs, to where Ms. Ramirez in her red pumps had appeared.

She came down slowly, each step accompanied by the sharp clap of a heel on the hollow wood stairs. She held onto the doorjamb as she stepped over the threshold. She stood on the building’s concrete stoop and scanned the small crowd.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said to everyone. Her voice was crisp and sharp. She had no makeup on. Her skin was darker than usual, her lips pale. She was pretty. She turned to the procession ladies. “I’m sorry, all right,” she said, leaning forward. “But I’m not like you. I don’t want to be lonely.” On the first-floor landing Rowdy was standing, only his hairy legs and white boxers visible.

Ms. Ramirez stepped from the stoop and walked through the crowd. She looked to me. I could tell she was upset but I knew she wasn’t upset with me. I looked into her eyes and knew she had no idea I’d been up there listening to her make love to Rowdy.

“Where’s Rogelio?” I asked her.

“Rogelio?” she said. “He left. He didn’t tell you?”

“No,” I said.

“He went to stay with his aunt, yesterday. He didn’t tell you?”

“No,” I said.

“Sorry,” his mother answered. “I’ll tell him you asked.” She turned up Throop Street and began walking toward Eighteenth Street. The seam of her tan skirt was just off-center, making it seem like there was a limp in her step. The crowd turned to look up the stairs, but Rowdy was gone. Within the building a door slammed. The sound echoed through the halls and exited the open windows. The old ladies started in.

“Sin vergüenza! What are we going to do now? Where’s the Virgin?”

No one knew what to do about the Virgin. Mrs. Gonzalez was assured by Sergio and Jorge’s parents that it hadn’t flown away, although Tony, the Morgan-Boy, kept saying that it had. That maybe the sin of the Gonzalez household had been too much for the Virgin and that she had flown back to heaven.

“Sin overload,” Tony said. He sighed and shook his head. Mrs. Gonzalez began to cry.

That incident brought an end to the Virgin Mary processions. No new leader came forward. The apostles seemed uninterested in electing anyone.

I fully expected to see Rogelio again, as if he had only gone away on vacation. But a couple months later his mother moved out of the neighborhood as well, she and Rowdy loading up a rickety-looking U-Haul, a puff of black exhaust hanging over the corner of Eighteenth and Throop like a final farewell.

I don’t know if Rogelio found out we were listening. I sometimes think he did, and that that’s why he left. But then again maybe he didn’t. In some ways I feel like he vanished, was stolen, kidnapped, like the Virgin out of Mrs. Gonzalez’s window. I know he wasn’t. I know his mother probably met up with him in Aurora and that they settled there, or somewhere else, maybe even farther away, a different state. Maybe he still remembers how it was when we were young. When childhood was the only neighborhood we lived in.