Painted Cities

MAXIMILIAN

I want to tell you three memories of my cousin Maximilian. Two of them involve his fists.

My cousin was a short man. He was, however, like everyone else on the Mexican side of my family, built like a brick two-flat. Maximilian was heavy and hard. He was a cannonball, the way my grandmother on my mother’s side was a cannonball, the way my uncle Blas was a cannonball. They were all skull, they were impossible to hug, but they were warm-blooded, steaming, like just standing next to them could get you through a winter’s day. My mother was like this. I miss her terribly.

But Max, my cousin, Maximilian, was young. He was sixteen or so when my memories of him first begin. It was at his sister Irene’s cotillion, in the basement of Saint Procopius church on Eighteenth Street and Allport. I don’t know much about the planning. I was eight years old. But I know my sister, Delia, stood up in it. She was a dama, and my cousin on my father’s side, Little David, was her chambelán. They were off doing their own thing, dancing, waltzing, the way they had been practicing for weeks, my sister constantly fitting and refitting her dress, me calling her Miss Piggy because she was chubby and more queda than the rest of us darkies.

That night I sat with my mother and ate cake and people-watched. My father, done with his shift at the basement door, was at a side table sharing a bottle of Presidente with his friend Moe. My cousin Chefa was dancing with my uncle Bernardo. My aunt Lola was on the floor dancing with her only son, my cousin Maximilian. The music fit the moment, balladas, slow, sentimental. It was all beautiful, all quite nice. Then Stoney showed up.

I am not sure my uncle Blas would’ve allowed any boyfriend of Irene’s to attend the cotillion, but Stoney didn’t have a chance. He had issues, most noticeably the tattoo on his neck that said ALMIGHTY AMBROSE.

No one had been at the door, not at that moment. So Stoney and his four partners simply burst into the basement. They had to be high. My father and Moe walked up to the four. There was wrestling, chair throwing, screaming. There were two gunshots, pops that sang off the basement’s polished cement floor, the massive concrete support columns. Then the police showed up. Arrests were made — three paddy wagons’ worth. But the moment I remember most, right before my mother pulled me under the table, was catching sight of my cousin Max, on his knees, his fist jackhammering over and over straight down into Stoney’s limp head. I couldn’t see Maximilian’s face, his head was bowed, but I could see his thick shoulders, his biceps bulging within his dress shirt. Behind him my aunt Lola was pulling at Irene, my uncle Bernardo was reaching for Max, and my father had one of the gangbangers up by his collar. All of them were staring down at Max. All of them had looks of horror.

Maximilian ruptured something. His arm and fist were in a cast for months. I don’t know what got worked out, but Irene kept seeing Stoney. Eventually they married. Stoney never had a cross word for Max, not that I ever heard.

Memory number two happens a few years later, when I was eleven. By that time Maximilian was eighteen and he had just graduated from Juarez High School. He had joined the army and we were having a going-away party for him in the yard behind his father’s house.

I had lived in this house, back when my parents were split up over my father’s cheating. I had spent nearly a whole summer there, holidays included. I had my own bed, the bunk over Maximilian’s. Where other houses were hard to find, my uncle Blas’s house was simply forgotten. The Kennedy Expressway rumbled within yards of the back door. Out the front door the South Branch of the Chicago River turned. There were neighbors to either side, but still my uncle’s house was lost.

His party was a year or two after I had moved back in with my parents, and though I had seen Maximilian nearly every weekend since I’d left his house, at the party he seemed aged. He had grown a thin mustache. He had on shorts and a Dago-T. His muscles looked thicker than usual. His skin was dark, worn even.

Maximilian was never a big talker. But as the afternoon progressed and he continued to draw from the keg, he spoke more freely, eventually calling out my name like I was a friend of his from the street. “Jes-se!” he would say. “I love you, bro.” And then he would start laughing.

Late into the party, the adults were drunk and I remember Maximilian putting his head under the tapper and chugging beer right from the keg. He was smiling, laughing as he gulped. He came up choking, spitting suds. He stumbled around the gravel yard trying to catch his footing. He seemed momentarily blind, lost in his spinning head. We were laughing. My mother had her arm around my shoulder. My father had his arm around my uncle. When Maximilian fell on his ass we doubled over in laughter. We were roaring. And at that moment we seemed really together, my father, my mother, my aunt and uncle, my cousins Irene and Chefa, Stoney, my sister, even my cousin’s dog, Princess. For a moment there, we were a real family. Behind us traffic droned on the Kennedy Expressway. And just out the front door, the South Branch flowed.

My last memory of Maximilian is from a couple of years later. I was thirteen. Maximilian was in his twenties. He was home from Germany, on leave because his mother, my aunt Lola, had died.

As sick as my aunt Lola had been, her death was mostly unexpected. In just a few weeks her cancer had gone from manageable to terminal. The last time I saw her was two days before she died. She was back in St. Luke’s Hospital and when I said hi to her she could only look in my eyes. Her look scared me. It was the kind of look that needed a voice to explain itself.

My aunt Lola was a generous woman. The months I lived with her she always had a steaming bowl of frijoles waiting for me when I came home from school, two or three thick tortillas waiting to be dipped and sucked from like summertime paletas. My aunt’s most remarkable feature was her bridge, which she would pull from her mouth and set on the armrest of her La-Z-Boy as she sat and watched TV. When she dozed off I would try to put the bridge in my own mouth. As my months of living there wore on, I used to steal her bridge and move it to some other location, in her bedroom or on the kitchen table, then wait for her to wake and be forced to speak, her pink gums showing through her fingers as she asked if anyone knew where her bridge was.

Her wake was held at Zefran Funeral Home, on Damen and Twenty-Second Street. There were masses of people there, cousins I didn’t know I had. Though I loved my aunt, and loved the frijoles she used to leave me, at the wake I felt no need to cry. Flowers were placed on her chest, blessings delivered to her open casket. At one point a boy standing next to me, a boy who had been introduced to me as my cousin, began to cry. He turned and gave me a hug. I wasn’t sure what to do. So I patted his back. “I know,” I said to him. “She was a good woman.” The kid raised his head and looked at me like I was at the wrong wake.

After the viewing we packed into cars and lined up for the funeral. The procession was long, too long for our family. My uncle and his daughters were behind the hearse, riding with my father in his black, windowless work van. A few cars back, Maximilian and I rode alone in his Chevy Celebrity.

We were silent as we drove down Pershing Road. Maximilian had placed our orange FUNERAL sticker on the top of the passenger-side windshield, and for me it was like a sun visor even though the day was overcast. The tick of the Celebrity’s hazards matched our engine speed, lagging as we braked, then racing when we sped to catch the car in front.

At Oak Park Avenue we slowed for a red light. Our hazards were on. Our orange sticker displayed. We followed the car in front of us into the intersection. Suddenly a red pickup took off from the crosswalk. The pickup broke through the procession just in front of us, then continued south down Oak Park. There was a short pause. Long enough for me to consider what an asshole the pickup driver was for cutting off the procession. We were on our way to a funeral. I had that much in my head when Max threw the Celebrity into a left-hand turn so sharp my temple knocked against the passenger-side window.

We chased the truck for three blocks, the Celebrity’s hazards clacking so loud they seemed about to explode right through the dash. Finally the driver of the pickup pulled to the curb.

Through the rear window of the cab I could see the man jerking around. He looked out of his mind, yelling to himself. As we pulled up behind him his shoulder heaved and he threw the truck into park. His taillights flashed to full red. He kicked open his door.

We were in front of a bank parking lot. It was the middle of the day but the lot was empty. Black screens covered the plateglass windows as if the bank was closed for good. Trees lined the street. I felt a million miles from home.

The truck driver slammed his door shut as Maximilian was stepping out of the Celebrity. The truck driver yelled something. He was a big man, white, potbellied. He was wearing a flannel shirt. His neck seemed like one big chin and his jeans seemed too tight at the waist. Each one of his steps had a little bounce to it, as if he had learned to walk on his toes.

The man continued yelling as Max moved forward. Maximilian didn’t say a word. He simply continued to close in, his feet looking small, his shoulders broad, his tight waist neat with his tucked-in dress shirt. His tie was draped over his shoulder.

As Max got within arm’s reach the truck driver raised his hand and pointed to my cousin’s face. The man’s mouth was still going. He was looking down at my cousin. He was giving him a deep, mean look, eyebrows pointed in, teeth showing as he screamed. I think he thought Max was going to stop and start yelling himself. Max simply kept on moving, and just as the man was ending a word, drawing his mouth shut, my cousin lit into him with a flush right hand that sent the man staggering backward. Even in the car, over the now practically dead heartbeat of the blinkers, I heard something snap, the man’s jaw, his neck, my cousin’s wrist. The man fell to a seated position and Maximilian bent over him and hit him three more times, solid, deep-looking punches to the left side of the man’s face. The man fell sideways and was out cold. His short arm flopped over his thick side and landed palm up on the street. Maximilian turned and started walking back to the car. His face was red now, swollen. He was crying. He looked like he wanted to yell, to scream, but couldn’t get anything out. The Celebrity’s hazards had stopped dead. The car had died. I wished we were back in the procession. I wished there was somewhere, anywhere, for us to go.