Three
Joseph S. Pfister
It was late afternoon when Mickey found him behind O'Sullivan's, a run-down restaurant on Chicago's South Side. The kid was a bloody heap of broken bones and teeth now. Mickey had the Louisville Slugger with the fake Alex Rodriguez autograph in his hand and a homicidal glimmer in his eyes. The gangbanger writhed on the cement, groaning imperceptibly. Blood ran from his mouth and nose in a river, and his left eye was already swollen shut. The kid was no older than Mickey, maybe even younger—not that it mattered.
"You Jerome?" Mickey asked.
The kid didn't answer; he only continued to roll and groan in pain.
More forcefully: "I said, you Jerome?"
The kid nodded, refusing to lift his head from the concrete.
"You know Kayleigh McKinnis?" Mickey snapped. "Ya ever touch her?"
"I don't know what you talkin' 'bout, man!" sputtered Jerome, covering his head with his arms. The kid's shirt was slicked in red, and Mickey noticed a tattoo—two hands folded in prayer with the name TYRONE scrawled beneath it—on his left tricep.
At that moment, a busboy appeared from the back of O'Sullivan's carrying a bag of garbage. Locking eyes momentarily with Mickey, he tossed the bag into the dumpster and returned back inside.
Mickey jabbed a finger in Jerome's face. "The McKinnis girl—she's in the hospital. Ya know that?"
Jerome shook his head. "No—I—"
With a grunt, Mickey wound up and slammed the bat down on the kid's knee. The crack was like wood splitting. Jerome howled in pain, pounding the ground with his fist.
Mickey bent down, his curved nose only inches from Jerome's bloodied face. "I said don't fuckin' lie to me." He could barely pronounce the words. The tightness in his chest had spread to every inch of him. "I know ya were there."
The kid shook his head again and peered up at Mickey, a beseeching look in his one good eye. "I don't even know who—"
"I said don't fuckin' lie to me, asshole!" Mickey shouted. Lunging forward, he grabbed Jerome by his cornrows, and holding him up, smashed him in the face with the end of the bat one—two—three—four times. He couldn't be certain—there was too much blood—but he was pretty sure he heard the kid's nose break.
Mickey had known Kayleigh McKinnis all his life, but she didn't know him. They had never spoken.
A scrawny first-generation Irish immigrant, Mickey's father came over from Belfast in the early '70s to live with a cousin in Chicago. He met Mickey's mother at a tiny restaurant, and a year later, little Mickey was born. A skinny, Irish kid named Mickey. He knew it was a real travesty. His parents must've thought it was real funny. Mickey the fuckin' Mick. Hilarious. But a name like that will give you tough skin.
Mickey knew everything there was to know about Kayleigh McKinnis. Her family lived in a two-bedroom flat near McKinley Park. Her oldest sister went to the community college, her father was an alcoholic, and her mother got chronic headaches that prevented her from working. Mickey had gone to school with Kayleigh since they were six. He remembered watching her on the first day of kindergarten. She wore her hair up in a huge pink bow. Kayleigh lost her virginity sophomore year to Vinny Upton, and whenever she felt self-conscious the corner of her mouth would curl up. She wrote poems about falling in love during history, had a birthmark on her left thigh, and after school worked at the local Laundromat. She loved orchids and painting, and hated the South Side almost as much as Mickey did. She began playing piano in the first grade, and felt more passionately about it than he had ever felt about, well, anything. Once he overheard Kayleigh at her locker telling several friends that piano would be her ticket out—her escape from the shit life everyone around her seemed to be mired in.
He often stayed after school just to hear her play—not that she ever knew. She played beautifully. There was no other way to describe it. She mastered pieces by Beethoven and Bach. Mickey didn't know much about music then, but he learned, in case she ever asked him what kind of music he liked. The only reason he ever went to class was to see Kayleigh. It had been that way since the fifth grade. He had no other reason to be there; in fact, she was the sole reason he had an outside chance of graduating in June. Mickey didn't like school—he'd never been very good at it. No teacher had ever taken any real interest in him and he didn't see any reason why they should. Now, with senior year coming and going, he didn't want to graduate. Life would be more of the same, except that he wouldn't be able to see Kayleigh anymore. She had earned a scholarship from Sherwood Conservatory of Music at Columbia to play piano there in the fall.
Mickey loved Kayleigh. He didn't know what love was supposed to feel like, but he felt it for her. Now she was in the hospital with a shattered wrist and broken jaw, and it wasn't clear if she would be able to play piano in the fall. When Mickey heard what happened, he felt something inside him crack and run through him like ice. He'd gone straight home, grabbed his bat and went looking for the piece of shit that did it. There were rumors. Mickey meant to kill him and he almost did. He beat him within an inch of his life and made sure he broke every bone in his body.
And the worst part was he didn't regret one second of it. Not one. Mickey had never thought of himself as a violent person—sure he got into a few fist fights every now and then, mostly over something a buddy said about his sister—but given the chance again, he knew he'd probably kill the bastard.
Cutting through the South Side, Mickey buried his hands deep in his pockets. The dark, gray world shuffled past. Forgotten buildings overrun with vines and boarded up windows, vast and somber, lined either side of the street, and people hurried along with their heads down, concentrating on the sidewalk in front of them. Mickey walked with his head down as well, trying to escape the afternoon's biting chill behind the collar of his brown-and-green flannel shirt. Even the remaining leaves in the trees seemed to whisper in complaint.
Lifting his eyes, he recognized the row of broken-looking buildings that adorned the approach to his apartment. He sauntered inside and took the staircase to the third floor, leaving the overcast afternoon and cold behind. When he opened the front door, there was no sign of life in the cramped kitchen, except for the rattle and clank of the washer in the adjoining room. Glancing around, Mickey noticed for the first time the permanent sense of despair that pervaded the apartment.
Ignoring the crumpled lottery ticket on the table, he peered into the darkened living room, illuminated by the glow of the TV. His grandmother—a proud, domineering woman with grimy, round glasses—sat in the recliner like an ancient statue, watching TV. His sister Eileen lay across the floor in a gray sweater, shaking a plush giraffe in front of her one-year-old daughter.
"Mickey!" she said, looking up and beaming. "There you are!"
Mickey smiled, the muscles in his face feeling tight, and dropped to the floor between his sister and niece.
Eileen was ten months younger than Mickey, and had never finished high school. She worked at a nearby restaurant as a waitress and made pretty good money. Her boyfriend worked in a cardboard factory, third shift, and always smelled like glue. He was all right in Mickey's book; he managed to visit regularly, and he and Mickey would toss the football around on Thanksgiving.
Mickey sat Indian-style on the floor, smiling at his niece. She had light hair like her mother and gorgeous green eyes that sparkled at everyone around her.
"So, how was school?" Eileen said, brushing her hair back behind her ear. She was always asking about school, trying to pick up on the little things she missed hanging around the apartment with her daughter while Mickey was in class.
Mickey scooped up his niece with a shrug and began bouncing her on his knee the way he often did when he got home from school.
"Learn anything interesting?" she prodded.
He shook his head.
"Michael!" snapped their grandmother. "Why don't you ever say anything? Your sister asked you how your day was. Don't make her ask you a thousand questions!"
Rolling her eyes, Eileen smiled at Mickey. "I never liked school, either."
Mickey nodded and glanced over at the TV. A rerun of "The Price Is Right" was on. The tiny, sparsely furnished living space was decorated with dozens of family portraits positioned at odd places around the room, containing the numerous faces Mickey grew up with. Some rested on the bookshelf and end table, others hung on the thin plaster walls, tilted to one side as if they carried some invisible weight.
The first time Mickey ever saw Kayleigh play piano had been at a recital in the eighth grade. He took the shirt his father wore on his wedding day and snuck in, ignoring the sharp whispers of his math teacher Mr. Harris at the door. He navigated the dark recesses of the dingy auditorium, looking for a seat, when the lights came on and he saw that she was already up onstage, draped in the yellow spotlight. Her glowing hair covered her face as she leaned over the piano in her evening gown and pounded the keys, their mesmerizing sound lulling him into a trance.
"You hear about that McKinnis girl?" said Eileen.
The icy feeling of dread in Mickey's chest returned, seizing hold of his insides, and he was back in the apartment again. Setting his niece down as if she were suddenly too heavy, he said, "No."
"You didn't hear about that?" asked his sister, raising an eyebrow. "Well, apparently someone jumped her off Vincennes on her way home from work the other night. Broke her jaw and wrist, then raped her. She's in the hospital at St. Mary's. Isn't that just awful?"
Mickey nodded weakly, feeling something churn in his stomach. He was almost surprised their grandmother hadn't interjected, but she wasn't listening. She was preoccupied watching Bob Barker reveal the next showcase for the contestants.
Eileen picked up the giraffe from the floor and shook it for her daughter. "Didn't you used to go to school with her?"
Scratching at the back of his neck, Mickey took one last look at his niece and then rose to his feet. "I think I'm gonna head out for a bit—"
"I should probably be going, too," said Eileen suddenly, leaning forward and planting a kiss on her daughter's forehead. Throwing her purse over her shoulder, she stood up. "So, wanna walk me to work?"
After walking Eileen to work, Mickey found himself wandering aimlessly through the city. The taller structures had assumed a ghostly presence in the late afternoon gloom. He didn't know why he wasn't home, but there was something about the thought of being there that made him feel inexplicably restless. He considered visiting Kayleigh at St. Mary's, but quickly dismissed the thought. He couldn't bear the thought of seeing her lying there in a hospital bed, so helpless and sad. Besides, what would he say if her parents were there? Uh, hi, I'm Mickey. I'm sorry, your daughter and I never spoke.
Cursing himself for even considering something so stupid, he plodded across an unfrequented side street. He wasn't quite sure how it happened, but he ended up off Vincennes, only two blocks from where Kayleigh worked. Kicking an empty beer bottle, he drifted past a dumpy-looking Shell on the corner of a small lot before deciding he wanted a soda.
The electronic bell sounded as he went inside, and after receiving a guarded stare from the cashier behind the glass booth, Mickey made his way down the aisle to the back cooler. He pulled a bottle of Mountain Dew from the cooler and weighed just taking it when the sound of shouts from the front of the store accosted him. Ducking down, he peered around the end of the aisle to see that a slender figure in a leather jacket had somehow managed to lure the cashier from his safe glass cage and now held him by the collar, pressing a snub-nosed revolver to the back of his head. The man screamed at the cashier to open the register, but the cashier—terrified and dumbfounded—refused, and each time he did, the man with the gun hit him in the back of the head so that a large pool of blood matted his hair.
Mickey didn't move, and he had no intention of doing so. He would just wait it out, all night if he had to.
The man struck the cashier on the back of the head again—a loud, fleshy thunk. The cashier's knees buckled, and the man had to hold him up to prevent him from collapsing to the floor.
"I said open it up, asshole! Now!"
Watching the violent scene unfold, Mickey was struck by an odd realization: he felt no sense of repulsion or horror at what he saw. Nothing stirred deep inside him. He realized he felt nothing.
"Ya fuckin' stupid?" yelled the man, his back still to Mickey. "I said gimme the fuckin' money! What about that don't you understand?"
At the same instant the cashier gave in, it dawned on Mickey that he knew the man with the gun.
"Patrick?" said Mickey, stepping out from behind the tower of Wonder Bread.
The man whirled around, fury transforming his eyes as he thrust the gun at Mickey. For an instant, the naked hate burning in the man's eyes seemed to flicker. Turning away, he jabbed the gun back at the cowering cashier and barked at him to finish loading up the money. Once he had, Patrick snatched the backpack from him, and giving Mickey a look, pocketed the revolver and disappeared out the door.
The gas station was silent again. The cashier remained in a crumpled heap on the floor, holding his head as the blood ran down the back of his head.
Mickey shook his head. "You shoulda just gave 'em the money, man."
Patrick O'Hannon was a twenty-something high school dropout—several years older than Mickey—who spoke with a heavy Dublin brogue, even though he'd never left the South Side. Mickey hadn't seen him in months, but heard he delivered blow when cash was hard to come by, which it often was. He sometimes used to stop by the apartment and visit Eileen. Whenever he did, he'd always rub Mickey on the head and call him Big Mick.
However, try as he might, Mickey could not banish the image of Patrick aiming the gun at him from his mind. It wasn't so much that he had pointed the gun at him—it was something about the look Patrick had given him when he did. It was look of despair that Mickey had only seen once before—in his father right before he left. Still, the whole incident wasn't what bothered him as he made his way home; it was his absolute inability to feel anything at what had happened, to feel any kind of reaction besides cold indifference. Things like that happened all the time, he told himself. That was just the way life on the South Side was. He couldn't change it, and it would be foolish to try. Yet, his mind couldn't stop returning to that look. Patrick hadn't said anything, but something in that look had told him everything.
It was the look of a man who had given up on life.
Mickey found his niece and grandmother asleep when he returned to the apartment. Going into the bedroom he shared with his sister, he shut the door and collapsed on his mattress, closing his eyes and willing all conscious thought from his mind.
He was back in the crowded auditorium with Kayleigh. The sound of her fingers on the keys had moved him as if she had physically grabbed something inside him and pulled. Right then he had wished he was capable of ever creating something half as beautiful. When Kayleigh played, it was as if she was in another world, where there weren't sprawling projects and people who sold drugs to kids on street corners or knocked off gas stations. It was as if the South Side didn't exist at all and she was free. Her long, delicate fingers danced across the ebony keys, and when they struck the last resounding note, there was a moment of calamitous silence—as if everyone in attendance were holding their collective breath. And then came the explosion of applause. The reverberating roar and whistles continued long after Kayleigh bowed and fled the stage and the last lights went out. Still, the applause persisted, as if the people in the audience had risen to their feet and were cheering for something greater than all of them.
Opening his eyes, Mickey could still hear the faint thunder of applause in the auditorium. Cradling his head in his hands, he stared up into the darkness and came to the realization that sometimes things happen for a reason and other times they don't.
Sometimes, he thought, they just happen, and that was just the way things were.
Mickey woke late the next morning feeling ill-rested. By the time he stumbled into the kitchen, his sister had already left for work and his niece was playing on the living room floor. Yawning, he rummaged through the cabinet and made himself a bowl of cereal. He had hardly been able to sleep the night before; every time he drifted off, he had the same dream where he heard Kayleigh's screams haunting him and there was nothing he could do about it.
He made up his mind to go to the hospital that morning. The decision to go hadn't been so much a decision as an unconscious calling. The idea of Kayleigh in a hospital bed connected to tubes had been too much for him. He had to see it, had to see for himself that her dream had vanished and was gone. The walk to St. Mary's was a solitary one, and as the city rumbled around him he found himself asking over and over what he was doing. The truth was he didn't know—he didn't know what abstract truth he hoped to discover by seeing her—but still he carried on. The morning was lead-gray, and the wind at his back felt like an insistent shove moving him toward the inevitable. By the time his eyes fell on the ugly brick building that was St. Mary's, he still didn't have the faintest inkling what he would say. She didn't even know who he was. Nothing had changed that.
The unexpected wail of an ambulance as it sped through the intersection of LaSalle and McCormick startled him, rustling his clothes in its wake. Mickey dropped his hands into his pockets and crossed the avenue with a frown, his thoughts returning to Kayleigh with newfound urgency. He was less than a block from the hospital and was no closer to deciding what he was going to say when he saw her. He had a lurking fear that he wouldn't be able to say anything at all—he would just freeze up and stare. What's there to say to someone who's had everything taken from them anyway? Mickey certainly didn't know. Whatever it was, he knew it was beyond his capacity to properly convey.
The only feature that distinguished the hospital from the urban blight around it was a large red-and-white sign that read ST. MARY'S HOSPITAL. Beneath it sat a chained picnic bench where a tall, loping black man with oily skin and gleaming white shoes stood, soliciting those passing by for spare change. The man paced back and forth in front of the bench with a nervous bounce in his step and an empty smile that remained glued to his face even when he was turned down or simply ignored. Another guy with a habit, thought Mickey, shaking his head. The South Side had plenty of those. Mickey had friends that turned into junkies; he knew all about it, the cravings, the feeling that your skin is crawling. Turning his head at the scrape of high heels, he glanced down the block and spotted a tiny woman with a bouquet of pink carnations and a purse slung over her shoulder approaching from the opposite direction. She walked in a hurried, frantic way and pretended not to see the man by the bench when he held out his cup.
Drawing a deep breath, Mickey reached the revolving side entrance doors, preparing to go in, when a terrified shriek from the woman caused him to stop. Before he knew what had happened, something had taken control of his legs and was walking toward them, something sharp rising in his chest. The junkie had the woman in some kind of strange bear hug and was trying to wrestle her purse away from her. Shouting as he reached them, Mickey grabbed a hold of the man and pried him off the woman, only to realize that the man had something in his hand. Shaking off Mickey's grip, the junkie spun, a look of mild surprise and betrayal coloring his face, and for a flickering instant Mickey thought he was staring into Jerome's panic-stricken eyes again. If he hadn't known any better, he would've sworn it was Jerome.
Overcoming his surprise, Mickey lunged for the revolver, trying to wrestle it away from the man as the woman's screams blocked out all thought. He managed to point the gun away from the woman—toward the ground between them—when it unexpectedly went off. The muffled retort caused the man to stop struggling, and leaving the gun in Mickey's hands, he took off running.
It was as everything in the world had lost its sound. His heart pounding in his ears, Mickey lifted his head and found himself staring blankly into the woman's wide brown eyes.
"Are—you okay?" he sputtered, surprised at the rattled sound of his own voice. Any remaining strength he had in his legs had ebbed away and he felt the sudden need to sit.
The woman quickly nodded, refusing to lift her eyes off his. "Are you okay?" she whimpered.
Letting go of his breath, Mickey's eyes darted anxiously from gun to himself. The bullet had missed. "Yeah," he said clumsily, "Yeah, I am."
The woman nodded, deflating with relief, as if able to breathe again. "Well, thank you," she gushed, steamy puffs of warm breath escaping her lips that dissipated in the cold. Her dark hair fell around her face, unbounded, and there was a small touch of panic that had remained at the edge of her coffee-colored eyes.
Mickey nodded, and glanced around in an attempt to avoid the searchlight of her uncomfortable gaze and control his fluttering pulse. The street behind them was largely empty, and it appeared no one else had seen what happened. The junkie was gone.
Returning to the woman, Mickey's eyes fell on the scattered, crushed flowers under their feet. He thought of bending down and picking them up—so she could maybe bring them to her niece with the broken leg or her brother with cancer—but he realized there was nothing he could do to fix them or make them beautiful again.
Joseph S. Pfister
