Upon The Return of Zachary Shakes

 

                          The neighborhood still looked the same. It wasn’t the nicest or the cleanest of neighborhoods but, it was still home. He derailed off the subway & made his way up the stairs of the station littered with newsprint, garbage & grime. Exited the turnstile & out the door into the Windy City November drizzle. The action seemed light for a Thursday night. Perhaps it was the weather keeping the locals at bay. Or indoors keeping warm. Curled tight up against their lover. Or some stranger just met. Or perhaps they’re in one of the many local dives. Alone. Drinking. Blowing smoke rings of “could have beens”, while feeding silver into a crying Wurlitzer. The deep amber of salvation that medicates the wounded heart & keeps its broken pieces glued together like an old toy from youth that one just can’t discard.
              As he wandered down Division Street, a cold breeze snapped like a whip, almost knocking his hat clear off his skull & down the dirty blocks of a long lost remembrance.
The nights of old. When he used to stride down these very same blocks. Amongst the bums & the run down. Old men & pushers. Puerto Ricans & Blacks. Old Polish woman pushing their cart s full of groceries & laundry. Fat Mexican woman with six kids running a muck. The occasional hipster on his way to score or some stripper’s loft party. It wasn’t a ghetto by any means. But it sure felt like one.
              The drizzle became a touch thicker when he reached the corner of Walcott. He made the left & started south. Some of the buildings were being gutted & rehabbed for cheap condos that will cost a fortune. Driving away the poor humble people who have been living there their whole lives. Rents will rise. Property values will rise. The immigrants that settled upon this neighborhood will be wiped away by a stroke of the magic wand we call gentrification. They will be cast aside a passed over for a newer, cleaner & wealthier mass of society. To teardown their history & rebuild a vision of prosper & economy & burry a past lifetime into a museum. Located in the back of yesteryear. Quietly banished from the memory of youth.
              He reached the apartment building. A small two flat, with an abandoned first floor for rent. He opened the main door that led to the upstairs. A dim bulb at the top lit the empty stairwell that creaked every step up. When he got to the top, he turned to the apartment door & paused. On the other side of that door was a past once lived. On the other side of that door was a memory, left behind in haste decisions & faults. On the other side of that door was a heart that beat with acceptance & caress. On the other side of that door was the resolution to every little fragment of existence & the ramifications of that existence, good or bad, right or wrong, that lead up until that very moment of the now & the very instance he knocked.
             But nobody answered.
             He knocked again a slight touch harder.
             But nobody answered.

             He exhaled a frustrating sigh. Unbuttoned his coat & fished through his pocket for a cigarette. Sat himself down at the top stoop & flicked his lighter. Listening to the rain starting to fall ever harder now against the top window. The wind, uprising & fierce.
He looked around the stairwell. The corners aged with cobwebs. The railing, falling off its hinges. The ceiling with cracked paint & a spot of mold where the roof used to leak.

            “Jesus, a can of paint might help.” He whispered to himself as he put the Marlboro to his lips for another inhale. That’s when he heard the clicking of her boot steps outside the door down the stairs.
                She opened the door unnoticing & carrying a grocery bag in her left hand & fumbling with her keys in her right. She put the keys in her pocket & started up the stairs. And with the creek of the first step, she looked up & stopped dead in her tracks.
She just stood there. Like a kickstand of psychodrama. With freight train eyes. Open wide traces of bright blue, hidden behind long wet locks of auburn remorse that hung lower than he’d ever seen before. Knowing it’s been over a year & a half since he watched, with adornment, her skeleton jangle down the broken backed sidewalks that scale the recollection of neighborhood he once knew.
               The haunting beginnings of a storm outside was the only thing slicing the silence. And that silence hovered above that stairwell, for what seemed like an eternity.
But she still stood there. Motionless. Glancing up toward the top of the stairs where he sat, with a smoking, medium-cool exclamation point over his head like a halo of hope.
             “How long’s it been?” she questioned, parting her wet locks from her face.
             “Ummm…about eighteen months or so, I think.” He replied with a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders. Fictitiously rolling his eyes up towards the ceiling. Exhaling a final puff of smoke into the night & extinguishing the butt on the corroded wood of the top stair.
              He looked at her. Peering into her deep blues. He can see her mind race for the words she wanted to say but couldn’t. Or maybe the words he’d hope she would say but wouldn’t. She looked like she wanted to run. Weather it was up the stairs into his arms or back out onto Division Street, he wasn’t quite sure.
             “You know,” she started, “things have been a little bit different ‘round here since you’ve been away.”
             “Yeah?” he snickered, “How different? Whatchya gonna tell me that’s gonna make me realize that I shouldn’t be sitting atop these stairs, right here, right now?”
               She breathed in deep. As almost as if she was going to give him one of her infamous, clichéd eulogies about lost love, unity, forgiveness, togetherness, humanity, the patriotic liberties of the common man, etc., etc. But, she knew. He could tell. There was nothing more that needed to be said.
              And just as those final words passed through the thought prosses of that mixed up mind of his, he spied a lone, single tear drop, that fell like the blade of a slow motion guillotine, down the side of her red November cheek.


             And that’s when he shot her.


             Because, just like Willie Nelson said,

           “You can’t hang a man, for killing a woman, who’s trying to steel your horse.”