The South Side Tour Guide Read online

  “You’re going to get yourself or someone else killed doing that crazy tour business of yours.”

  “Your job is way more dangerous than mine.”

  Ken buttoned his cop shirt and glared at Andy. “I’m expected to stand in harm’s way. I’m a police officer. You’re a civilian messing around where you don’t belong. You better wise up.”

  “I made over fifty bucks in tips alone last night,” Andy said. “I’m starting to bring in almost two thousand a week, more than in my entire life. I’m not about to give that up. Not for some inane moral code that means nothing to anyone anymore.”

  Andy had once read in a survival manual that the best way to avoid being crushed in a stampede was to run with the flow. That’s what Andy was doing. Scurrying alongside the charge of scavenging humanity.

  Fully dressed in his blue uniform again, Ken examined his Glock and reholstered it. “It’s more than just moral codes and money, bozo,” Ken said, slapping the top of Andy’s head. Ken had meant to give him a playful pat, Andy suspected, but it had come hard enough to make him wince.

  “If you really care so much about me,” Andy said, rubbing his sore head, “why don’t we move in together?”

  “You know how I feel about that.”

  Numerous times, Ken had explained his dilemma: as the youngest of eight siblings, coming out to his family might cause unwarranted anguish for everyone, “Possibly even one of my parents having a heart attack.” Andy had heard the justifications until his ears had gone numb.

  Ken carried his coffee to the table opposite Andy. “Don’t take me not wanting to move in with you personally. I like you a lot. I want you all to myself. You got a killer body for a thirty-six-year-old. And, man, gotta love your cleft chin. But you could use a haircut. I’ve told you before I like it off your neck and ears.”

  “You want me like a toy you keep on a shelf,” Andy said. “You take me down when you want to play, and when I’m not convenient, you store me away again.”

  “Is that some kind of bullshit pop psychiatry you heard on TV?”

  Andy gulped his coffee, which had already turned tepid and bitter. “Never mind. It’s no big deal. I gotta get back to bed, Officer Ken.”

  Ken leaned over the table and seized Andy’s arm. “That’s another thing. I told you never to call me that, especially in front of my colleagues. I almost bopped you tonight, the way you were mocking me in front of Ramiro.”

  Pulling back from Ken’s tight grip, Andy said, “I wasn’t mocking you. I thought I was being cute.”

  Ken sat back. “I don’t want you acting cute in front of my colleagues. You need to wise up.”

  Andy deposited his empty mug in the kitchen sink and lay atop the mussed futon mattress, which he almost never folded away, and cinched his robe tighter across his waist. Ken shadowed him and gazed down at him like an ominous redwood.

  “Things are good between us, Andy. You’re just too ignorant to realize.”

  “I’m not complaining,” Andy said to the white stucco ceiling.

  “I’ll hold back from telling you what I really think of you for now.”

  “I’ve already gotten enough of a browbeating from people,” Andy mumbled. “I’ve been called racist, uncaring, opportunistic. Join in. Tell me what you think of me. I’m a horrible citizen, right?”

  Ken gazed into the mirror, straightening his uniform. “You said it, not me.”

  “I always show civic responsibility. I report all the crimes I witness to 911. More than what many others might do.”

  “You could do a lot more, and you know it,” Ken said, standing beside him.

  Andy propped himself up on his elbows. “How?”

  “You know how.”

  “I told you over and over. There’s no way I can do that.”

  “You’ve avoided it for too long.”

  “The South Side is bombarded with shootings,” Andy grumbled, “and they make it sound like I’m the single man who can end it all. I’m not about to squeal and louse things up just to make some prosecutor feel less guilty for taking bribes.”

  “I’m on your side, Andy. Don’t forget that. But I won’t be able to hold them back. I’m tired of making excuses on your behalf. They’re getting suspicious.”

  “Give me one good legal reason why I should talk.”

  “You’d help us do our jobs.”

  Andy dropped his head back on the pillow. “That’s not a legal reason. Besides, why don’t you help me do my job?”

  “The city will put an end to your nonsense soon enough, anyway. You might as well go easy. That’s how things work around here.” Ken took one final gulp from his coffee and set the mug on Andy’s tiny desk. “Get ready to chat with prosecutors when the time comes. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Ken moved to leave. Andy sat upright. “You sure you have to go?”

  “Got lots to do.” He gave Andy a wet coffee kiss. “Do me, yourself, and everyone else a favor. Stay home tonight.” Seconds later, the door thumped shut behind him.

  Andy dropped back onto the mattress and switched on the television with the remote, hoping to soothe the dull ache of loneliness that had pierced him without warning. An old syndicated sitcom agitated him more. As kids, he and his sister, Lillian, used to watch that very show. Even those days had disintegrated into dust.

  The police scanner crackled alive. Two youths in Humboldt Park were behaving suspiciously. Nothing interesting. Andy got up, turned down the volume, and lay back in bed. The old lady above sneezed and dropped what sounded like a bowling ball. In the murkiness of his Uptown studio, Andy forced himself to chuckle along with the canned laughs coming from the television set.

  Chapter 3

  “DAD, where’re my sneakers?”

  Coffee in hand, Harden turned toward his son, Mason, staring at him through the screen on the storm door. “In the closet,” he said in a voice that struck him as overly detached.

  “Not those, my baseball cleats.”

  Harden marveled at how his boy resembled him. Light-blue eyes, sandy-colored hair, cheeks that puffed out like an autumn foraging squirrel’s. “Can’t you ask Kamila?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  His rare morning of peace on the front porch interrupted, Harden trudged inside the house, the storm door slapping shut behind him. The buzz from the kitchen television drowned out his thoughts. Olivia was giggling at the cartoons while she ate her cereal. If only he had more time to clear his head. Always so many distractions. Never enough time to breathe. To think.

  He rummaged through the pile of shoes and jackets knotted on the foyer bench. “Didn’t I tell you to clean this stuff up?”

  “Kamila said she’d do it. Besides, I already looked through all that. They’re not there.”

  “Kamila can’t be expected to do everything.” Harden lifted a plastic bag containing a pair of faded, grungy cleats. “You mean these aren’t here?”

  Mason blushed in a way only an eleven-year-old could get away with. “Guess I didn’t see them. Must’ve put them there and forgot.” He snatched the bag and fled upstairs.

  Tiny awards, like a smile from his only son after finding a pair of soiled cleats, were all that Harden might expect to lift his spirits nowadays.

  He could see into the kitchen. Kamila was urging Olivia to finish her cereal so that she could load the dishwasher. He almost dreaded facing them. His seven-year-old’s messes irked his inner fussbudget. “A big slob,” Mason, who exemplified his father’s penchant for order, would call her.

  I love you, I love you, he repeated to his children inside his head while stepping into the kitchen. I know I don’t always show it, but I love you.

  “Look, Daddy.” Olivia reached for a picture she’d drawn but nearly upset her glass of plum juice.

  “Watch it, Olivia,” Harden said. “Try to be more careful, won’t you?”

  She continued to wave her drawing. “Do you like it?”

  “It’s nice, sweetheart,” he
said, barely glancing at it. “You’re a good artist.”

  “I’m going to write a play to go with it. I’m going to call it ‘The Kranes’.”

  “That’s good.” He turned to Kamila. “I might be home a little later today. Can you stay until about seven? If not, I can ask my mom to take off work early and stop in for an hour or two.”

  “Yes, I can stay.”

  Kamila—a godsend. His Bosnian housekeeper kept the family from fraying into tatters. She wasn’t the neatest housekeeper, but she was better than nothing. Besides, it was nice to have a female around the house for the kids. He’d hired her last summer after his promotion so he’d be less of a burden on family and friends. She worked full time five days a week in summer, part-time afternoons and every other Saturday once school commenced.

  Despite her embarrassingly meager salary, he had to cut back on a few things to afford her. (At-home haircuts became more frequent.) He’d considered asking her to move into the basement bedroom and become a live-in housekeeper, but he feared the negative ramifications of her constant presence might surpass the plusses.

  Kamila, in her own way—like all of them—brought another level of anxiety to him. The forty-something-year-old Eastern European transplant wanted more from him than the typical employee-employer relationship, Harden was certain. He’d done his best to pretend he never noticed.

  Harden arranged the contents of his briefcase while the TV cartoon clonked, clunked, and guffawed. Kamila rinsed Olivia’s bowl and juice glass and cranked on the dishwasher. The added commotion stretched Harden’s patience. “Didn’t Mason turn on that dishwasher last night before bed like I asked him? We couldn’t possibly have used up that many dishes this morning.”

  “Mason never does what he’s told,” Olivia said, adding finishing touches to her drawing.

  “Don’t be supercilious, Olivia.”

  Olivia repeated the word “supercilious” over and over under her breath and giggled. “Daddy, can we go to the swimming pool?”

  “Let me have two seconds to think, please. I haven’t even had a chance to finish my first cup of coffee yet. Where’s that…. Olivia, is that my pen?”

  Olivia, eyeing the pen in her small dough-like fist, frowned.

  “I told you never to take anything out of Daddy’s briefcase.” Harden snatched the pen and placed it in its proper slot. “I need my things for work. You don’t want me to lose my job, do you?”

  Kamila moved to help Harden with his briefcase, but he gestured for her to back off. Instead, she tried to entertain Olivia using her typical low-key voice with an accent that had become more commonplace to the Krane household than the hum of cornfield crickets.

  “When will you get home, Daddy?”

  “I just told you, about seven.”

  “Can we get a dog?” Mason strolled into the kitchen, clenching his baseball mitt.

  “We’ve been over that, Mason.”

  “Why do we live on a farm if we have no animals? All my friends have at least a dog.”

  “You can visit theirs. We’ve got too much going on here without needing to worry about a bunch of grungy animals. And you forgot to turn on the dishwasher last night like I asked you. I told you, if you have a bowl of ice cream before bed, you’re the last to stack the dishwasher and turn it on. How hard is that?”

  “Daddy, I want you to help me write my play,” Olivia said, kicking her feet under the table, which caused Harden to almost drop the briefcase lid on his arm.

  “Be careful, Olivia. Now get upstairs like Daddy’s sweet little girl and brush your teeth. Try not to make a mess.”

  “My Raving Rhino app is stuck again.”

  Exasperated, Harden pushed aside his present needs and tried to fix Mason’s favorite app game for the umpteenth time since the boy had downloaded it on his iPod last month. “Christ, Mason, why don’t you play another game, one that works?”

  “I like this one.”

  “I will try,” Kamila said.

  Mason swiped the iPod from Harden before Kamila could grab it and began tinkering with the dials. Glad to have his hands back, Harden snapped the briefcase shut and swallowed the last of his lukewarm coffee. “Who’s driving you to your game this afternoon?”

  “Mr. Hart again.”

  “Make sure you—”

  “Thank him for taking me to the game and for driving me home,” Mason said almost verbatim, since Harden had told him many times.

  Harden chuckled and rubbed Mason’s hair. “Just do as you’re told, smart aleck.” He thanked Kamila in advance for staying later, instructed Mason to keep his sister out of trouble, and hopped in his Jeep Patriot.

  Green cornstalks, taller than Mason, flanked the driveway as he turned onto the country road for the short drive to work. He longed to dirty his hands on his two-hundred-twenty-acre farm with the white L-shaped old Craftsman-style house and semiwraparound porch that he’d inherited from his grandparents. But the world had different prospects for Harden Krane.

  Once he’d earned his master’s in biotechnology from the University of Minnesota, a hometown enterprise offered Harden a magnificent job that Lillian had insisted he accept. The next thing Harden knew, he was living on the farm like he might a suburban cul-de-sac and commuting to work. Now, with two children to raise solo, farming dreams seemed forever tucked inside sticky, stubborn drawers.

  It was a wispy fantasy he’d clung to since he was a boy growing up in nearby Duncan, a town with fewer people than most big city high schools. When visiting his grandparents, he’d spent hours exploring each nook and cranny of the farm, certain the wind blowing through the towering burr oak, the farm’s namesake, whispered his name.

  His inability to farm full time was a blessing, he figured, keeping his speed steady. Farming entailed countless hours of hard work. His grandfather had spent so much time in the field he’d often fallen asleep on his tractor. In addition, there were the endless hours bent over accounting ledgers and logs. With two active children and no wife, that would be impossible for Harden.

  For now, he had to make do with Dick Carelli’s quarterly rent payments. After Grandpa’s death, Grandma had rented Dick the land, since she could no longer farm alone. Harden, embarking on his suit-and-tie career, had extended the lease. At least he enjoyed watching the family farm put to good use.

  He slowed enough to wave to Burt Anders, who was unloading wood planks from the back of his pickup. He wanted to build a bridge at the bottom of his driveway to stave off flood damage. Good neighbors, Burt and his wife, Alicia. They had always been there for Harden during the tough times. He made a mental note to help Burt with the modest construction project, but then remembered he had to work late.

  Yellow prairie asters along the edge of the road whizzed past in a blur as he turned onto the wider thoroughfare and picked up speed for work. The lush Iowa farmland stretched in a sea of green cornfields. Billboards dotting the road hawked ethanol gasoline distilled from those yields. Harden wondered how many corn-for-fuel lobbyists were in Washington at that moment buying lap dances for politicians.

  The Jeep’s air conditioner sucked in odors of the beleaguered, blistering summer. I used to worship this time of year. What happened? Life elbowed him in the jaw and left him with two demanding children and a house to maintain; that’s what happened. Since finding himself a single father, Harden looked forward to the end of summer and the start of school more and more. Let someone else fuss over Mason and Olivia.

  Three years ago, the school district had required that Mason, still coping with the upheaval of his home life, attend summer school. Harden had lectured him before the start of each subsequent spring term, “Don’t start slipping again. You’ll have to go to summer school. You don’t want that, do you?” Yet the dastardly voice taunting Harden inside his head had always whispered, “You’d like it, wouldn’t you, if Mason could go to summer school like last time so he’d be out of your hair.”

  Harden didn’t want to be the kind of fath
er who would wish for his son’s scholastic failure so he’d get a little more peace. “Thank God for Loretta Ficklemeyer suggesting Kamila,” he whispered toward the windshield.

  He made the final turn for work, and Marshall Farming Enterprises’ one-story office building emerged ahead. He parked his Jeep by the usual maple sapling and headed inside. The stench of solvents assaulted his nose. He never grew used to the stink that clung to the walls, floors, ceilings. Nothing matched it, other than the stench people leave behind in bars after the Super Bowl.

  Arty Ficklemeyer greeted him with a light pat and a reek of cigarette smoke almost more irritating than the office stench. “Good weekend, Harden?”

  “Hectic but nice. And yours?”

  “Good. Lunch later?”

  “Okay, sure, Arty. Come get me.”

  Lucinda Jamison smiled at him from the copying machine. “Hi, Harden. Hope you had a good weekend.”

  Harden’s cheeks burned. “Thanks, Lucinda, you too.” He waved to Charlie Marshall, the company’s owner, who was speaking with one of the new Bosnian machine-parts workers, and picked up his pace for his office. Behind the closed door, he sat at his desk and situated his mind. Thank God for work.

  His position as senior agronomist required he hustle ethanol, which he judged limited in value. But on the brighter side, his job was basic nine-to-five, and he could set his own hours if needed, with occasional overtime and even a rarer scouting or business trip. As an added consolation, his coworkers and customers knew him well. They trusted each other. The camaraderie was important to him for a job that he disliked.

  As much as he wished he were riding a tractor, without his work he’d be a lost man. He loved his kids (I do, I do. I really love them), but a daily reprieve from the chaos they stirred proved essential to his mental health.

  Life’s a kick in the crotch, he thought while hunkering down to another Monday.

  Chapter 4

  HARDEN was rushing to ready himself for his late afternoon teleconference with an ethanol buyer from California when he received a call from Mason’s baseball coach, Tyler Phelps. Mason and another boy had scrapped over a few poorly chosen words. He had tossed both from the game. Mr. Hart, at the game with his son, couldn’t leave, so Harden would have to pick him up.