Painted Cities

SIDE STREETS

In some quarters the death had become a macho thing. After all, the story involved Casper walking a full city block to the nearest tavern and ordering himself a beer so he could get change to call himself an ambulance. From all accounts, Casper had been shot at least three times that night.

It wasn’t uncommon to see kids acting the whole thing out. One skinny brown kid running up to another and pointing a thumb and forefinger pistol at a mate’s chest, then voicing three loud “booms” before skittering back to his hiding place. Here, it seems, the children always embellished slightly. The “boom” they used, as everyone knew, was reserved for imitations of a.45, and Casper had been shot with a.38. But they did it anyway, it made for more dramatics, and on side streets dramatics count for more than reality.

The child portraying the fallen hero, Casper, would usually stagger down the street, making small guttural noises as if gurgling blood. Sometimes the role player would say something like “I have — to — get — to Trebol’s, get me — some — change,” but nobody knew if Casper had really muttered these words. A few stumbles usually followed. Trips over his own feet, a couple of all-out collapses, complete with the customary pre-death limb twitches. But the player would always find it in himself to rise up and get to the front door of the local tavern, where he would say, “Give me an Old Style” (the brand varied depending on the player). This was as far as the act ever went, and at this point the performance was judged.

Technique was most important — the player, through all his ad-libs and theatrics, had to convince the others that he was the actual person, had to convince unsuspecting adults that he really had been shot. It was never enough. There was always some other kid who claimed he could do it better. That he could’ve pulled off the act ten times better and could’ve fooled ten times as many people. So the play would go on, back and forth, until dinnertime, after which the act was tried out at night, when realism abounded.

More than just Casper’s death marked that day twenty years ago. God knows the neighborhood crawled with death back then. Each day some new mutilation would present itself and give the church groups and the men working on their Ford pickups something to talk about. But with Casper’s death an aura emerged. Even years later, each person who recounted the story did so as if the event had happened only days ago. The real good storytellers in the neighborhood claimed the scene ran through their minds like a massive car crash: everything in slow motion.

In the churches along Eighteenth Street, the mothers were reminded of Casper’s death while performing their stations of the cross. They’d see the Virgin Mother embossed on those plaster moldings and imagine Delores Calderon, Casper’s mother, in the Virgin’s place. Delores had become a martyr, a woman who had had to give up her son for something better, and they all wanted to be like her. They all wanted sons who could take Christ’s place on the plaster moldings the way they imagined Casper could.

Mostly in pity but sometimes in jealousy, the mothers lit prayer candles for Delores’s and Casper’s souls — one extra when the mothers were really feeling mournful, and always two or three extra on the anniversary of Casper’s death. On those days, the immense light emanating from the overabundance of candles climbed the cold marble walls of the churches and shone through the stained-glass windows onto the annual memorial services held on the front steps. The light filtered out effortlessly, casting upon the crowd the soft oranges and blues of the glass mosaics.

Mrs. Calderon’s disappearance wasn’t all that unexpected, at least when it first happened. For the females, a period of mourning is always anticipated. For the males, on the other hand, a stout heart is required; appearance at work the next day is mandatory. Casper, though, had no father. The older women in the neighborhood said that his father had died in a steel mill before Casper was born. Whatever the case, Mrs. Calderon mourned alone. Speculation as to her whereabouts didn’t start up until three weeks after Casper’s death. Usually, during mourning, one is at least seen — perhaps walking, aimlessly and sorrowfully — but seen nonetheless. With Mrs. Calderon, there had been nothing.

Her apartment was broken into by the local clergy, her bank accounts traced, but all anyone could discern was that she had somehow vanished. Some said that she had gone back to Mexico to reclaim an illegitimate child. Some even believed that she had committed suicide, maybe jumped off the Twenty-Second Street bridge, where it was commonly said that “if the fall doesn’t kill you, the polluted river will.” Most likely, though, and a few of the older mothers knew this temptation from having lost children of their own, Mrs. Calderon had simply become a shell of a woman, and had returned to Mexico to live her final years without the constant reminder of her son’s death. Still, it was an odd thought. To think that that once-strong woman, that bowlegged brute who used to waddle down Eighteenth Street carrying bags full of tortillas and chiles, had turned into a sagging, broken-hearted crust.

Of course, no one knew if any of this was true. Just as no one knew if Casper had actually ordered that beer in Trebol’s tavern — Trebol always swore to this as fact, but Trebol was also known as the neighborhood’s King of Bullshit. In truth, none of it mattered anyway. No one really cared if the stories had been passed down with accuracy or not, because the one thing everyone was sure of was that even though Casper had been a notorious drug addict, one whose drug of choice had been marijuana joints dipped in embalming fluid, it was during one of his highs that he came up with the ridiculous idea to get all the gangs in the neighborhood together. And even though he had been shot the moment he stepped into Latin Counts territory, shot by the first gang he’d tried to approach, in that instant he yelled “Truce,” he had made a completely heartfelt attempt at doing something in his life.