You’re flying at the city. Colossal, unbreakable, all black, white and iron from up there. You’re looking the skyscrapers dead in the eye, the lake stretches out beyond the structures, mighty, oceanic — it’s irresistible. If you look straight down, your shadow passing over the neighborhoods, you see a near-perfect grid, like a chain-link fence. Look close and, on the chains, you see matchbox bungalows with postage stamp yards, linked by lawns, well cared for. You see the streets, imagining the century-old cobblestones showing beneath the cracked tar of winter’s potholes. And if you get right down in close, landing on a tree branch outside one of those bungalows, maybe shaking loose some rain water gathered there in the night as it might in the summertime, you see, in the front upstairs window, Michael Boyle splayed out like a starfish on the grayed carpet of his bedroom floor.
He stretched his long, skinny limbs wide and flat, trying to cool himself down. When that failed, Michael groaned and sat up, still hotter than he imagined anyone had ever been. He cupped the backs of his knees with his palms, brought them to his face and breathed. He liked that smell, the smell of himself. He looked out the window. South Seeley Street was wide open. The morning sky was a just lick lighter green than the shivering leaves. Rain was coming.
Michael rolled over and snatched a St. Rita t-shirt from the pile on his floor. He took a quick whiff, decided it was fine, and pulled it over his head as he walked down the stairs and out the door to sit on the front porch. The cement stoop felt cool and rough on his legs through his gym shorts. The hot wind swept a can down the block, an Old Style. Michael hocked a loogey two squares down the sidewalk and felt pretty all right about the distance he got on it.
Across the street, Sully’s sister, Ava, emerged on the front porch — with those shapes. Her shapes were such shapes. Still in her pajamas, she sat down to paint her toenails. Bright purple. Her tiny boxer shorts had green bunnies on them and she wore a gray Mt. Calvary football shirt. Varsity. Her dark hair fell in her face and she flipped it back without using her hands. Shit, she was cool. The boys from the block approached and, noticing her, waited on the Boyle’s lawn. Michael’s dad came out, almost hitting Michael with the door as he tossed it open.
“Get off the fricking lawn, you savages,” he said it straight, without yelling. The boys scattered like rats in an alley, aimlessly. Michael found himself standing beneath Ava on the lower steps of the Sullivan’s front stoop.
“Hey boy, excited for today?” she said.
“Yeah, me? Yeah. What?” he said, watching Sully wrestle his brother Joey in the gangway.
“Hello?” she said.
He stared at her feet. She wasn’t very good at painting her nails. There was purple all over her toes.
“Fisher Fest,” she said. “You’re going. I mean, everyone goes.”
Michael did not know what a Fisher Fest was. The only kids he knew who went to St. John Fisher, the next school west of his, were on his Little League team but they never told him about a Fisher Fest. He pictured the St. John Fisher parking lot filled with baby pools full of salmon, flopping for their lives. He pictured himself catching one in each of his bare hands. He pictured Sully’s sister very into it.
“Oh, yeah. Everyone goes,” he lied.
“Everyone but me,” she said. He tried to count the freckles on the bridge of her nose to distract him from how he could see her underpants because of the way she was sitting with her knees up under her chin. She rocked on her hips and he could see more than he was ready for. 21 freckles.
“Grounded. Can’t go,” she sighed, gathering up her the purple polish, cotton balls, pink remover stuff, paper towel.
“If I go, I’ll, like, bring you something from it or something?” Michael said, surprising himself. What? He wished he could shove the words right back down his throat.
Sully walked up, laughing and breathing heavily. Joey was gone.
“Yeah, she’s grounded ‘cause she got caught with – “ Joey ran up behind him and clocked his brother and then tackled him onto the lawn before he could finish. Michael had to know. This was the most important end of a sentence he had been deprived of since Kevin Doherty’s brother Jimmy started to tell the boys what blow job meant but was interrupted by Sister Ralph selling bags of rice for starving kids in Africa. He found that one out soon after. But this. What had she been caught with? What could Sully’s sister do wrong?
She flipped open the storm door and held it with her hip while she settled all the things in her arms. She looked right at Michael, like a panther looking at a squirrel, then went inside. The door yawned and smacked shut.
Next door, Mr. Doherty dropped a big white cooler off his truck, wheeled it back towards his garage. The dads were playing poker today. Michael heard him dump in dollar bags of ice from South Town Liquors — on the other side of Western, his dad told him one time, because there’s no booze allowed on the east side of Western Avenue in the 51st Ward. Fisher is on the west side of Western. Michael wondered if they would have booze at Fisher Fest. Maybe that’s what he could get for Ava.
Michael walked back through his yard, out to the newly-paved alley where they had a basketball hoop done up on the garage. The boys shot around for a while, though both basketballs had been deflated some by the heat. The thud of thirsty leather against the cement made it feel even hotter out.
Michael couldn’t look Sully in the face. All he could think about was Ava’s legs, bare under her boxer shorts on the porch, the lacy edge of her underpants peeking out in flashes as she rocked those tan, bare legs. Michael kneeled down to tie the laces of his knock-off Jordans. He looked down the gang way between houses and he could see her through her bedroom window, trying on dresses in front of the mirror. Her bra was pink and she wore the same white underpants from earlier. She slipped on a white dress and studied herself from different angles. Michael got to see all of them. She paused, pulled off the dress, then reached back to unhook her bra. A bug flew in front of him and Michael clapped his hands together to kill it. He held them there, down on one knee, when Sully passed the basketball to him. Michael fell forward. His chin hit the cement and busted open. The flat ball plopped next to him and didn’t even roll away.
“Holy shit, boy, you ok?” Sully said, as Michael wiped his chin with his bare, dirty arm. Blood. And gnats in front of his eyes, dizzy.
He pulled himself up, went into the house to clean himself off. He snuck into the basement so his dad wouldn’t see him. He must have, though, because he came down and smacked Michael in the back of the head before Michael even knew he was standing there. He hit his busted chin on the sink and the blood spread on the porcelain. The hurt made everything quiet, radiating from his chin out to his ears like they were filled with cotton. Michael’s father spoke but he couldn’t hear him. He grabbed Michael’s face, wiped his chin with an old towel.
“Hold it there,” he said. “You ok?”
Michael nodded. His father sprayed the sink and wiped it down, filling the bathroom with the smell of the St. Rita lunchroom, late in the afternoon when no one was in there. Michael would’ve liked to be in the lunchroom with Sully’s sister, just alone. She never wore a t-shirt under her uniform shirt like the other girls did. He imagined them in the lunchroom, his lungs full of ammonia and lemon smell, her in just her pink bra and lacy-edged underpants, walking across the cold linoleum like it was a beach. He would watch her from across the room, like a movie. His eyes burned. His father turned to him and breathed deeply. Holding the bloody rag in his hands, he kissed his son on the top of his head and hugged him close. He gave Michael a look as if to evaluate his state of ok-ness without having to ask.
“Clean up the stairs and the yard.” He started to walk away. “Don’t let your mother see that shit.”
“Dad,” Michael said, causing his father to stop on the steps. He didn’t turn around. “Can I go to Fisher Fest tonight?”
“Who’s gonna take you?” he said, still facing the stairs.
“I’m just gonna go with my friends?” The towel on Michael’s chin bobbed up and down when he talked, making him feel like a puppet.
“No,” he said. “And don’t ask me again.” He ascended the stairs.
All the air left Michael’s body. He pulled the towel away and felt his bare chin, half-expecting to touch the bone. It was just crusty. He grabbed a clean shirt from the laundry room and stood there, alone in the dark for a moment.
When he returned to the street, the clouds had blown away. It was so bright, he couldn’t see down the block at first. When his eyes caught up, Michael saw that block was on. Everybody was out. Someone had unscrewed the hydrant. The full force of the Seeley water supply rushed out, creaming in the street, first yellow and green and brown and then white and clean, washing away the hopscotch the Doherty girls had drawn in pink chalk.
The two girls didn’t even notice. They didn’t bother to mourn the loss of their hopscotch, they just ran at and over and through the gushing water in their swimsuits and Velcro sandals. Their hair flipped around all wild, matted across their faces in hydrant water and summer sweat. One of them had red popsicle running down her face and arms and belly between the brightly colored halves of her watermelon two-piece suit. Michael wondered about the last time he felt that way, and his thoughts returned to Ava. He imagined that she was sitting in her room eating peanut butter with a spoon, wearing just her underpants and the t-shirt he had gotten blood on - but with no blood on it - her room filled with the smell of ammonia and lemon.
The gold light in the street streaked through the trees more precisely and the air grew a little cooler. The dusk bugs began to buzz. Michael’s second shirt of the day clung to his sweaty body. He set out to find his dad, flapping his shirt to try to generate a breeze. He spotted him. From the end of the Doherty’s gangway, Michael watched his dad gesture to the table to offer for a round from the cooler. He stood on his hind legs like a bear, self-conscious about his balance. Two big fat raindrops plopped on the street. It was still sunny and the wet street glittered like the yellow brick road.
“You get something to eat, hon?” Michael’s mom came up behind him. She held a plate of pink and green Jello-O and pasta salad. The contents slid around on the waxy plate. It was for his little brother, who stood close at her side. “Patrick’s gonna eat. Why don’t you sit with him on the porch and have a hot dog?”
Michael knew he had to play all the right moves, so he agreed. He went inside but bypassed the kitchen for his bedroom. He had $64 dollars hidden in his sock drawer that he had saved since his First Communion. Michael jammed the crisp, untouched bills into his pocket and ran back down into the kitchen. He got some grapes and a hot dog from the paper plates his mom had set out. He thought maybe, if he got there early enough, there might be a game he could win to get a stuffed animal at for Ava. From her shorts — she liked bunnies? He wondered.
He returned to the porch.
“Where’d you go?” Patrick said.
“Shut up,” Michael said.
“Wanna play egg toss?” Patrick said, pushing his pasta salad around on the red and white paper plate with his clear plastic fork. The oil from the pasta salad picked up a hint of a rainbow on the plate.
Michael said nothing.
“Wanna play catch?”
Mom smiled at the boys from across the street, smoking a not-so-sneaky cigarette with ladies from the block.
“Yeah. Yeah, let’s play catch, Pat,” Michael said, setting his plate down.
He grabbed a football from under the porch and the boys tossed the ball across a few lawns. Patrick struggled to grip his hand between the laces. Back and forth and Michael thought of how Ava’s hair might smell. Like grape pop and girl sweat. She would probably like the bunny if he could win it. Michael focused on throwing the football in a perfect spiral. He might win the bunny that way. He finally heard his dad laugh, that big belly laugh that shook the house when he drank shots in the kitchen with his brothers and Michael knew it was now or never. Pat tossed the football back his way as the late afternoon light faded more in the street. Michael grabbed it, squared up, settled his fingers back in the laces and spiraled the ball as far as he could. It turned and turned and turned and Patrick turned his back to his brother and watched it crash into the Doherty’s bushes.
Michael was gone. He ran down Seeley so fast he could swear his heart beat him to 103rd Street. He flew. His gym shoes hardly hit the cement. Around the corner, he turned onto 103rd Street, emerging from the quiet side streets between his block and the traffic of the next busy street. Cars whipped by, cut the air. Michael kept running west and, as soon as he hit Hoyne, he ducked into the alley and worked his way towards Fisher Fest.
He had failed to find out what Fisher Fest actually was. Still, Michael was certain that he had to win the bunny in the football toss and bring it home for Ava. Hoyne, Hamilton, Leavitt, Bell. The alleys echoed the sounds of a summer dusk. He could hear the Cha Cha Slide from the block party on 102nd and Bell. As he reached the cross streets, Michael checked to make sure no aunts or uncles or cousins or neighbors might be there, sipping a Miller Lite and Cha Cha-ing real smooth, trying to get funky, ready to get in his way. He checked left, checked right – Uncle Dan was out on his lawn, watering flowers, his Pyrenees mountain dog Santa breathing heavy in the heat, looking like the saddest polar bear in Chicago.
Michael had to make a run for it. A raindrop splatted on his eye. Why was he watering his flowers? No time. With a deep breath, Michael sprinted across Bell, through the alley, and out onto Oakley. No one would know him there. He walked in the shadows down Oakley, showing his pre-braces teeth to every squirrel and bird that dared cross his path.
At 101st Street, he crossed west of Western and looked down the busy street at all the bar lights, shouting and shining in the purple of early night.
“Hey yo! Hey man!” he heard and jumped behind a parked Buick, scanning the area. Two men shook hands outside McNally’s bar. One of them was Jean Jacket Rogowski, Michael’s neighbor across the alley who drove a van around picking up the neighborhood’s dry cleaning. Michael breathed deeply, smelling his sweat and that dirty, fresh smell of being outside all day, liking it, and watching the orange of the guys’ cigarettes glow from down the block.
He continued on his way and reached the park quickly. St. John Fisher was only a few more blocks and he would have to cut through the park to get there. He approached the night softball league crowd with confidence, focused on his goal.
As he got close, a car passed the playground, washing the orange and blue slide in light and there she was. Sully’s sister, Ava, standing in her white dress and at the top of the slide. Michael heard her laugh. He thought she was grounded and seeing her at the park confused his plans. Would she even care if he brought her the bunny now?
Michael shoved his hands in his pocket and played with the $64, the bills now soft as a puppy’s ears. He imagined what else he could buy her - maybe a boat? - and he wondered if it mattered. Another car swept passed the playground, washing Ava in light again. Michael could see the straps of her bra — blue. Not pink. He had missed something.
“Oh my God, hey! Hey boy!” she said.
He looked up. He felt full-body, girl-attention paralysis. Ava waved at him, gestured for him to come to her. She held a bottle of red Gatorade in her left hand and used her right to swing her light body into the tube of the slide. Michael stood on the other side of the fence that surrounded the playground and watched her emerge from the glowing ring of the slide, a flash of white skirt and legs. He curved his fingers into the fence and felt the green rubber that had survived on some of the links. She inched herself to the mouth of the slide after losing momentum and laughed when she reached the edge and her bare skin made a fart sound. She rocked her legs off the end. Her feet were bare and her toes, purple. Michael didn’t care where her shoes were.
She hopped down and walked towards him.
“Hey what are you doing at the park right now?” she said.
Her skirt flashed up. 98 freckles.
“Going to Fisher Fest?” she said. Michael couldn’t believe she knew him off the block. As she came closer to the fence, Michael could see her hair sweated to her face. Her lips were dry and she licked them, biting the bottom one as she leaned her forehead against the fence. Her breath was hot and sweet and bad when she laughed. He could smell the vodka in the Gatorade bottle. Lemon.
“Hey boy, what are you doing here?” she asked again, leaning into the fence with her body, her shapes. Her girl shapes, so close to him. She hung her arms on the top of the fence and swayed her body back and forth, leaning closer to Michael like laundry on a line. She leaned in and bumped against him through the fence. She was warm and soft. She dropped the bottle and it splashed red everywhere. She tried to jump back but she was slow and she fell into the fence. Michael tried to catch her. Ava’s back against his arms, with the fence between them, was like butter on hot corn. She laughed again and turned into the fence, slinking down it until she was sitting in a pool of Gatorade and vodka and woodchips and body butter. She pulled her skirt up to show him through the fence how sticky her legs were. Her legs. They were strong. Tan.
“I was going to —“ he started, but she reached her fingers through the fence to touch his lips, shushing him. With her salty vodka fingers jammed through the links in the fence, held against his lips, she looked around the park and leaned her whole weight against him. Their faces were so close. 122 freckles. He breathed her in. She smelled sour but like she would taste like glitter too. She tilted her head, her mess of hair falling beside her face.
She grinned and said, “Listen.” The whole world stopped. No traffic. No softball. No cicadas. Just Sully’s sister. Ava. “Everybody knows about the rainbow banana.”
She cackled and her girlfriends ran over to find out what was funny. All the sound rushed back.
Michael leaned back from the fence. He shoved his hand in his pocket, rubbed the soft dollar bills together. The girls gaggled together, whispering. He watched their shapes, bumping and swaying. Gnats swarmed above them. The park sprinkler, a smiling plastic whale, spit at them. The sound of the water on the cement could have been the gnats, applauding with their tiny gnat hands.
He took off. Slow at first. But as he ran west, Michael ran harder than he thought he could, harder than he had on his way to the park, harder than any baseball game ever, harder than the heat. As he swoomed down the street, his ears filled with the night and he thought he could still hear the girls back on the playground. The sirens of the cicadas began to moan as dusk fell above the treetops, swaying in the slow, thick breeze. The darker it got, the greener it became. And the cicadas. No one expects them to be there in an off year.
Michael looked ahead down the street at the dark greenness and fireflies. A little boy rode a white cooler strapped to a motor-scooter down the middle of the street and another kid chased behind him with three flashlights like maracas. Michael turned his head to watch the flashlights down the darkening street but continued moving forward. A crack exploded in the alley and Michael stumbled. As he fell towards the cement, the streetlights flickered and then hung on, humming. The crack boomed — a firecracker — and spidered smoke in the purple sky, now darker, sizzling. His flesh tore on the street, gravel digging into the heels of his hands, his forearm, his right elbow. He could hear nothing but his own heart in his head. He laid out, facedown on the street and craned his neck up. The American flags on the front of every bungalow hung motionless. He thought of Sully’s sister’s legs. He should’ve counted those freckles. Michael felt cold water touch the backs of his knees and he thought it had finally started to rain but when he rolled over onto his back, he realized it was only a sprinkler.