"That's why I ask around and come to call on you. People tell me you work for Streets and Sanitation."

  "I work for sewers. Besides, this should be a Health Department matter."

  "Sanitation Department. Health Department. Somebody sends me an order to appear in court."

  The smell is very thick in the room.

  "Can we talk back in the parlor?" I say.

  SEVEN

  Instead, we go up on the roof, where Ruth shows me the coops she's built for her birds.

  "I keep them here until somebody starts stealin' them away," she says.

  "You let the pigeons fly, don't you?"

  "Of course, I do. Twice a day."

  "Couldn't maybe one or two, now and then, get lost and you don't miss them until there's maybe ten or twelve gone?"

  "Pigeons don't get lost. Besides, I know every one of my babies, and every time they fly and come back, I count them with my eye."

  "But I understand there's other pigeon fanciers who fly their birds off the roof tops around this neighborhood. Couldn't your birds join up with their birds? "

  "I don't play those silly games. I band every one of my babies on the leg. If they stray like you say, I expect these people would bring them back."

  "Well, all people might not be so honest as you."

  "Not bird people. Bird people got pride and would not steal a bird out of the sky without the bird belonged to another what liked the war games, even if they got the prejudice against the foreign black woman what moves into the neighborhood. No, somebody was stealin' them out of the coops at night where they was locked in. I'm not the only one losing pigeons. And not only pigeons."

  "How's that?"

  "Also chickens. Mrs. Dumbrowsky, lives in the middle of the block, used to keep chickens in her back yard."

  "I don't think that's according to the code either."

  "Are you a clerk?"

  "I'm not,a clerk."

  "So stop counting the little breakings of the law. Mrs. Dumbrowsky kept chickens for the eggs and for the table. Somebody steal them all."

  "It looks like birds has got a problem around this neighborhood."

  "Don't it?. That's why I keep my babies in the bathroom now."

  "I got to ask you this, I don't mean to get personal. How do you take a bath?"

  "I bath with a cloth and a pan of water. You do it right and often and you stay very clean."

  "Also how do you. . ."

  "Ah, the pot. Well, I time myself so I don't got to go except when the birds are out the window and into the sky."

  EIGHT

  When I go down to the street, Weenie is waiting for me on the stoop.

  "What are you doing, Weenie?" I say.

  "Well, Jimmy Flannery, I figure a smart guy like you can use a smart guy like me."

  "You know the Back of the Yards pretty good?"

  "Well, didn't you say so not half an hour ago?"

  "That's right, I did."

  "Well, you can take your own word for it."

  "I'd like to talk to some of the other people what raise birds around here."

  He leads me up Packers Avenue to West Exchange and a two-flat down from the corner. We walk through the alley into a backyard which is maybe a quarter-filled with cages and some rickety lofts raised up on poles, the cats shouldn't get to them.

  A big man, bending over a pigeon he's got laying on its back in his hands, don't even notice when we come up behind him.

  "Don't jump, Mr. Saginaw," Weenie says. "It's only Weenie and a friend."

  Saginaw looks at us over his shoulder. "You got to whistle coming through the gate, Weenie. I'm a nervous wreck. You gave me a start just now, and I could have squeezed this pigeon half to death."

  "What are you doing to it, Mr. Saginaw?"

  "Giving it some vitamins. Who's your friend?"

  "This is Jimmy Flannery, Mr. Saginaw, and he come over to Back of the Yards from the Twenty-seventh to see if he could help about all these stolen pigeons."

  "What do you think you can do, Flannery?" Saginaw says.

  "Well, If don't really know. I just thought I'd ask around, see what the problem is. Then I'd figure out could I do anything."

  "The problem is, fanciers are losing pigeons."

  "Pigeons like Mrs. Kuba's been losing?"

  "That the black woman raises tumblers and Chinese whites?"

  "That's the one."

  "Well, I've got nothing like she's got. All mine are regular homers, and I've been losing them plenty."

  "What do you think is doing it?"

  "First I thought it was neighborhood cats. There's more of them around than I ever see in my life. But I got a dog. Not a mean dog that would go after people, but any dog will go after a cat. Did no good."

  He gets up from the bench where he's been working on the bird, and makes a face.

  "Have you got a little arthritis there, Mr. Saginaw?"

  "More like a little constipation. You get old, you get irregular, you know what I mean?"

  "I've got just the thing for that," I say, going into my pocket and taking out the licorice stick that I put there after I drank the tea.

  "What's this stick?"

  "Natural licorice. The best thing in the world for what ails you."

  "Somebody's been chewing on the end."

  "Well, I just took a taste. You can cut that end off with a knife."

  He bites the other end. "Tastes like licorice," he says, as though he's somewhat surprised.

  "That's what I said it was."

  "So you did."

  "You have any other ideas about what happened to your birds?"

  "Thought it could be vagrants. We got more of them, vagrants, vagabonds, and homeless, than we ever had before. I figured they could be stealing them for dinner. So I padlocked my lofts, but somebody broke in anyhow. It could be vagrants."

  After we talk to Mr. Saginaw, Weenie takes me over to see a man by the name of Crespi, a soft-eyed Mexican. We find him up on the roof crooning to a bunch of birds what perch on his head and shoulders. These birds haven't got any lofts or cages. He's just built them a thing like a lean-to shelter, with a shelf for feeding pans and watering pans, and twenty or thirty perches.

  "My name is Flannery," I say, sticking out my hand.

  He smiles and reaches for it. The birds flutter around him, then settle right back down.

  "How can I be of service?" he says.

  "I'm wondering are you losing any birds like Mrs. Kuba over to Justine, and Mr. Saginaw over to Packers and West Exchange."

  "Yes. Someone is stealing my birds. Or something is eating my birds."

  "What makes you say that?"

  "Well, they disappear, don't they?"

  "I mean, have you ever seen any evidence of anything killing them on the spot?"

  "No, I never have."

  "You lock your birds up?"

  "I let them fly whenever they want to fly."

  "So, they could have just flown away?"

  "My birds won't leave me."

  "Well, it'd be easy to steal them, wouldn't it?"

  "It would be easier for the birds to escape anyone who tried to catch them."

  "You going to do anything about it? Like at night when you got to go into your flat for supper and go to bed?"

  "What can I do?"

  "Mrs. Kuba keeps them in her bathroom," Weenie says.

  Mr. Crespi nods his head and scratches one of the birds on the head.

  NINE

  Mary Ellen and Mike get a kick out of the story of Ruth Kuba and her pigeons.

  "Is this Ruth Kuba Polish?" Mike asks.

  "Well, no, she ain't. She's Haitian."

  "A black?"

  "Nearly every Haitian I ever met was black," I say with an edge to my voice I don't really mean to let show.

  "One of them people what came in by boat?"

  "Well, I suppose she come in from the East Coast by train."

  He looks at me like I'm still a kid cracking wise to his father. "Illegal?" he says.

  "Yes."

  "So, give it to her precinct captain."

  "I don't know who is her precinct captain."

  "Then refer it to her ward leader."

  "I don't know does she live in the Eleventh or the Twelfth."

  "So, look it up on the map."

  "Well, she specifically asks me for the favor, and I already give her my word I'd see what I could do."

  "You give her your promise?"

  "Well, not exactly. I just said I'd look into it."

  "So you look into it and you tell her she can get help from somebody in her own neighborhood."

  "What are you so against I shouldn't help this woman a little?"

  "We got enough blacks come up from the South to work in the factories during the war. . ."

  I wince when he uses that word, because I know it leads to the wrong way of thinking about other people and can slip out sometimes when you're not paying attention and cause bad feelings. It ain't even that he means it the wrong way. He's friendly with Calvin Chapman, who's this friend of ours what is a colored doctor. . .See there, I did it, I said "colored" instead of "black," and that could get me dirty looks and protests in certain quarters. I suppose you get used to a certain thing, a name, a word, and the habit's hard to break, but you got to break old habits if you can, even if you think the other person is silly for taking offense. You got to respect how the other fellow wants to be treated or what he wants to be called. I don't mind anybody calls me a Harp, but that's me. Anyway Calvin is not only a black doctor but he's married to a white woman, and that should really get my old man's back up, but it don't.

  "We got enough home-grown blacks," he says—so he's caught my reaction—"without we start importing them."

  "Nobody's importing them. These are people on the run."

  "They're coming in here jumping on the welfare, taking jobs, overloading the system."

  "Well, the point is, they mostly take jobs the people what were born and raised here don't want. They pay taxes on what they earn and are usually too afraid to use facilities what are available to any citizen."

  "The neighborhoods are turning black," he says.

  I understand how this hurts him. He loves the neighborhoods and would like them to stay the same forever. Like we can go over to the Thirty-fourth and know we can get the best kielbasa at Blatna' s Last Chance Saloon. Or Gage Park used to be mostly German, the Scotch-Irish was over to Lincoln Park, and the Italians over to Depaul. Now, it's true, almost all the old neighborhoods are going black and brown. The whites are leaving for the suburbs and Chicago ain't the Chicago my old man grew up in anymore.

  "I don't know why you're so hot against the blacks," I say. "You and Cal are as friendly as a couple of pups."

  "Well, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Jimmy, you're not comparing Cal with some illegal from Haiti, are you? Here Cal has pulled hisself up by his bootstraps and made something glorious of hisself, overcoming every trial and tribulation. . ."

  "I didn't say. . ."

  ". . .and here you are putting down a man you call a friend."

  ". . .that Cal was like Ruth Kuba. I'm saying it don't matter whether they got the same color skin or don't. It shouldn't matter, something like that, if somebody asks you for a little help."

  "Well, there you are, Jimmy. I'm glad to see you're showing a little charity. If this Ruth Kuba is a decent person, she deserves a helping hand."

  He's done it to me again. He's taken my own argument and twisted it around so it looks like I was defending bigotry and he was standing up for generosity, tolerance, and compassion. I look at Mary to bear witness, but she's laughing and is no help at all.

  After a little while Mike clears his throat as though he's been thinking something through.

  "With a feather in his pocket?" Mike says.

  "There was a feather in this fella's pocket?"

  "There was."

  "A pigeon feather?"

  "It was."

  "You think it's just a coincidence this fella has a pigeon feather in his pocket and the people what raise them over to Back of the Yards are losing pigeons, not to mention the lady with the chickens?"

  "What do you mean coincidence?" I say. "We got ten million feathers in the pillows just in this building alone. Not to mention all the feathers in winter vests. The man with the feather in his pocket was way over to the harbor in the Fifth. This Ruth Kuba is way over to the Back of the Yards."

  "Right downstream as the sewers flow, you look at the map. Also, if I remember certain features of the tunnels underground from my days fighting fire. . ."

  "Why would being a fireman give you any inside dope about what's going on in the sewers under the city?"

  He looks at me as though he's not at all sure he's happy about being the father of a stupid child. "Firemen got to know the layout underneath the streets. Sometimes fires burn through basements and we got to go down in there just like you. I've looked at many a map of the sewer system in my day, and I'm telling you, if memory serves, the tunnel you was in that dumps out into the harbor used to serve all the neighborhoods all the way up to the stockyards in the old days."

  I picture the map of the underground systems and, damn it, if he ain't right.

  He sees the look on my face and puffs up like one of Ruth Kuba's pigeons. "So my thought is, one thing could very well have something to do with the other."

  "How you can connect a man chewed in half by an alligator with a bunch of pigeons, just because of one feather, is beyond me," I say.

  "Before you two get into a fight," Mary says, "why don't we give it a rest? Tomorrow you can nose around and see what you can see."

  Now I'm annoyed with everything and everybody, you know how you can get?

  "What do you mean, 'nose around'? I don't want to have nothing to do with any of it. Ruth Kuba can keep her pigeons in her bed if she wants to, I don't care. And there's nothing much I can do about a man chewed in half over to the Fifth."

  "You made a promise to the bird lady. You found the dead man. You know you can't drop either of them," Mike says in the voice of a scolding saint.

  After Mike went home and Mary and me get into bed naked because it's so warm, I say, "Yes, I am, too, going to let it drop," and she says, "Why are we talking about alligators and pigeons on a night like this?"

  TEN

  So, all right, Mike and Mary Ellen know me better than I know myself. I don't let it drop. But I don't "nose around" either. I just figure as long as I got to go over to "Chips" Delvin's house to let him know about the dead man, I might as well ask him has he heard anything about alligators.

  Mrs. Banjo, Delvin's housekeeper all these years since his wife's death, opens the door and says, "Yes?" She says it like she don't know me. I can never figure out why she plays this game with me, since she's opened the door to me at least five hundred times. I think it's her idea of how the housekeeper of a very important political person should act. If she admits she knows me, maybe it would be like showing favoritism.

  "It's me, Mrs. Banjo," I say, like I done every other time. "I've come to see the boss."

  "Why are you wearing a shirt and tie in weather like this?"

  "It shows respect."

  "A little vest without the tie would do just as good. After all, times are changing."

  "That seems like a fine idea. I'll remember."

  "All right, then, don't stand there letting the traffic smells in. I'll see if himself will see you now. He could be taking a nap."

  He's almost always taking a nap, but the kind of naps he takes are the naps of an old man. He drifts in and out of being awake and asleep so you can hardly see the difference. Since our little trouble I ain't seen a lot of my old Chinaman, but those few times he even drifted in and out while I was talking to him.

  In a minute Mrs. Banjo comes back and says Delvin will be pleased to see me. . .did I bring some cold beer?

  "Well, no, I didn't," I say.

  "That's all right, then, I'll make you both a lemonade."

  "That would be very nice."

  "You'll have a little dram in it?"

  "Just the lemonade," I say, and she walks away nodding, but I know when she brings us the lemonades there's going to be a shot of whiskey in each one.

  Delvin's in his same rackety overstuffed chair. The dial of the old Majestic radio in the corner is glowing, and music is coming from the grillwork in front of the speakers. I look at it, wondering where could he get the tubes to run such an old radio.

  "Has a beautiful tone, don't it?" Delvin says.

  "I was wondering where you'd go to get replacement tubes when these burn out."

  "I never have to. Some things never die. Sit down, sit down. Are you having a good time down in the sewers?"

  "It's taking me back to my youth," I say cheerfully.

  He laughs a little laugh like he's clearing his throat. It's enough to bring tears to his eyes, though, and he sits there looking like an old elephant. You know the way they weep?

  "You take a joke like a man, I'll give you that," he says.

  I didn't know sending me down to walk the sewers again was supposed to be a joke, but I don't say anything.

  Mrs. Banjo comes in with two glasses already poured and half a pitcher of extra lemonade. "Fresh from the icebox," she says. "Don't drink it too fast, it'll give you the headache."

  After she's left the room, Delvin leans forward like he's confiding in me. "She's getting old. Keeps on calling the frigidaire the icebox. Ain't that strange?" Then he leans back. "So, have you had enough? Have you come to petition me to raise you up?"

  "If there's anybody needs raising up, it's the Latino male I found down in the old abandoned sewer under the Fifth over to the lake."

  "I've been told. Give you a scare, did it?"

  "I don't think I'm going to need a dose of milk of magnesia for another month."

  That gives him a tickle, too. He laughs, and weeps, and wipes his eyes again.

  "I come to ask the man who knows if anybody knows. Are these stories about them little baby pet alligators what get flushed down the toilets really true?"

 

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