Neal Pollack

I was spot on time to the abandoned church, where I used to spend my nights and many days before the old folks’ home took me, the state footing the bill. Tristam wasn'’t there. I took my day’s meds sitting on the concrete steps before the boarded-up former door. I'’d been waiting for the kid for nearly an hour when the nausea and pain kicked in, so I crept through the space between the half-kicked-through boards over the church’s front door. I laid down in the dark of the vestibule in communion with the Sain'ts, the wind and whine of the expressway now a fading memory, nothing present but the pain; I concentrated, pinpointed all my holy energy on a flash behind my eyelids and soon enough fell fast asleep.

When I woke the nausea was still present but the pain had subsided. “Tristam,” I called out, expecting the kid to be conked out there somewhere near me in the dark. There was no answer, but I listened and could hear above the low outer din of his breath coming in long, slow gasps.

“Motherfucker,” I said, crawling dazed toward the sound. Nothing. I punched what I took to be his leg, and a voice I didn'’t know boomed calmly through the cavernous dark.

“Who are you now?” it said. I got to my feet.

“Jehovah?”

Then a scrambling broke out and I was forced down onto my back, tackled. Tristam laughed through the darkness.

“Gotcha,” he said.

“Goddammit, boy,” I said. Tristam giggled and giggled on, and when finally I got a look at him, when he turned the flashlight on and I could see, I divined from the glare in his eyes and his slurry voice that he was fucked.

“I was just kidding, old man,” he said. “Don’t look so damn mad. You got the shit?”

“I’m holding,” I said.

“Oh ho ho. Well, hand it over.”

“I mean, you ain’t getting anything until you hold to your side of things.”

He sorta held there, held the flashlight pointed upward, held his body tensed in that brief attempt at comprehension of my words. And then when he fished through the muddled bank of connotations and meanings in his head, when he got what I was saying, I guess, he lunged at me, raising the flashlight high in the same motion as if to bring it down on my head. I caught his hand, and any fear the young man may have mustered in my head quickly turned to righteous rage. I wheeled out the only thing of particular strength I had anywhere near, the pilot, and in the gloom wheeled it around and caught Tristam on the side of his head. He fell hard to the ground, the flashlight rolling from his hand and coming to rest with its beam shining right in my face.

“You never wait for me to answer,” I said. “What’s my name, motherfucker? What is it?” He didn'’t answer. “You call me Jehovah, you hear? Jehovah.”

I crawled over him and brought the pilot down on his head again and again and again. Tristam didn'’t move. I may have hit him ten times, twenty times, but I know I stopped, the pilot now an unrecognizable mass of cracked plastic, everything plastic, and other parts. I crawled from the vestibule and into the sanctuary, where the light penetrated the empty window spaces above, stripped as the place was of its old stained-glass windows, lighting on the old wooden altar, where I knelt and prayed for the first time in years, through it all the murmur in my head telling me that the fraud of the act was just that, a fraud, that I was praying to myself, that I alone would determine the route to salvation.

A week or so after I killed the boy I stepped up on the bus, strident in my conviction, noble as the street itself as I paid the bus driver, murmuring “God bless,” and turned to face the crowded interior.

“I am Jehovah!” I hollered.

I opened my bag, bowed, and flung a handful of baby-blue towels into the crowd. I pulled a flyer up to my eyes and began to read, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name

”

ALEX PINTO HEARS THE BELL

BY C.J. SULLIVAN

North & Troy

Alex Pinto shuffled down North Avenue. His head was bowed as he bumped into a young man coming out of Klecko’s Hardware Store. “Yo, pops, watch where the hell you walking. Damn, old man. You don’t own these streets.”

Pinto kept moving. He didn'’t hear the guy. If he had, there might have been a confrontation. Pinto felt that the young men of Humboldt Park were too disrespectful. They had no sense of the neighborhood. They lived here to either be killed on these streets in some stupid and senseless turf war or to finally get a decent job and move to the suburbs. The neighborhood of Humboldt Park would never be home to them like it was to Alex Pinto. This was a place they came to because there was nowhere else for them to go. Humboldt Park was not only home to Pinto, it was the only place on earth he wanted to be.

The young today would never understand that. This was the video-game generation. Everything came too easy to them, so when they had to dig down and fight for what should be theirs, they had nothing to draw on. No sense of self or family. It was all about them.