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By Root 6047 0

rear of the club. Then I rose in the elevator and came out at the barbershop. There, the usual busy sight—the three barbers: the big Swede with dyed hair, the Sicilian, always himself (not even shaved), and the Japanese. Each had the same bouffant coiffure, each wore a yellow vest with golden buttons over a short-sleeved shirt. All three were using hot-air guns with blue muzzles and shaping the hair of three customers. I entered the club through the washroom where bulbs were bleaking over the sinks and Finch, the real Johnny Finch, was filling the urinals with heaps of ice cubes. Langobardi was there, an early bird. Lately he had taken to wearing his hair in a little fringe, like an English country churchwarden. He sat nude, glancing at The Wall Street Journal and gave me a short smile. Now what? Could I throw myself into a new relationship with Langobardi, hitch a chair forward and sit with my elbows on my knees, looking into his face and opening my own features to the warmth of impulse? Eyes dilated with doubt, with confidentiality, might I say, “Vito, I need a little help”? Or, “Vito, how bad is this fellow Rinaldo Cantabile?” My heart knocked violently—as it had knocked decades earlier when I was about to proposition a woman. Langobardi had now and then done me small favors, booking tables in restaurants where reservations were hard to get. But to ask him about Cantabile would be a professional consultation. You didn’t do that at the club. Vito had once bawled out Alphonse, one of the masseurs, for asking me a bookish question. “Don’t bug the man, Al. Charlie doesn’t come here to talk about his trade. We all come to forget business.” When I told this to Renata she said, “So you two have a relationship.” Now I saw that Langobardi and I had a relationship in the same way that the Empire State Building had an attic.

“You want to play a short game?” he said.

“No, Vito, I came to get something from my locker.”

The usual casting about, I was thinking as I went back to the beat-up Mercedes. How typical of me. The usual craving. I looked for help. I longed for someone to do the stations of the cross with me. Just like Pa. And where was Pa? Pa was in the cemetery.

eight

At the Mercedes shop the distinguished official and technician in the white smock was naturally curious but I refused to answer questions. “I don’t know how this happened, Fritz. I found it this way. Fix it. I don’t want to see the bill, either. Just send it to the Continental Illinois. They’ll pay it.” Fritz charged like a brain surgeon.

I flagged a taxi in the street. The driver was wild-looking with an immense Afro Jike a shrub from the gardens at Versailles. The back of his cab was dusty with cigarette ashes and had a tavern odor. There was a bullet-proof screen between us. He made a fast turn and charged due west on Division Street. I could see little, because of the blurred Plexiglas and the Afro, but I didn’t really need to look, I knew it all by heart. Large parts of Chicago decay and fall down. Some are rebuilt, others just lie there. It’s like a film montage of rise fall and rise. Division Street where the old Bath stands used to be Polish and now is almost entirely Puerto Rican. In the Polish days, the small brick bungalows were painted fresh red, maroon, and candy green. The grass plots were fenced with iron pipe. I always thought that there must be Baltic towns that looked like this, Gdynia for instance, the difference being that the Illinois prairie erupted in vacant lots and tumbleweed rolled down the streets. Tumbleweed is so melancholy.

In the old days of ice wagons and coal wagons householders used to cut busted boilers in half, set them out on the grass plots, and fill them with flowers. Big Polish women in ribboned caps went out in the spring with cans of Sapolio and painted these boiler-planters so that they shone silver against the blaring red of the brick. The double rows of rivets stood out like the raised-skin patterns of African tribes. Here the women grew geraniums, sweet William, and other low-grade dusty flowers. I showed