Off the Road - 46

a jazz novel on a typewriter

5

It is called the White City a place where the agricultural pores into the stock stockyards and is transformed from the Anglo-Saxon word for living to the French word for dead. Faith and Sal part their car along way from the Chicago Loop and they walked for the exercise of moving their lips, the center of the downtown of Chicago which spreads out to tangle up the legal and the illegal of the most corrupt town that calls itself sane. Though no one else believes that. There was a Starbucks shot by two men in the early hours of the morning. Perhaps they just wanted to listen to that old-time rock and roll, without the rock but plenty of roll. Perhaps it was connected with a victim who was shot in the head and who was shot while sleeping, with three of them dying before they even reached a hospital. It was a rest-in-peace kind of adventure. It was that kind of town when it is in warfare and warfare is always in fashion. How did Dean find Sal as one of the noticeable ones? Pump up the volume. So it goes.

Yesterday was the penultimate day and today is the ultimate as if Sal were studying Greek in an intensive course for the final. Up goes the tones in a 3 Pattern Way which accented the roundabout syllables at the end. Sal stood around looking up at the Maypoles which held up the loop and were the center of the CTA which held the “L” and which all converged: blue, Brown, green, orange, pink, purple, red, and yellow – and made many people stare upwards at the trains hovering in the atmosphere as if by magic. 1892 was the founding and its spidery tentacles went out in two the distance along the inner Sea without salt. Cane to the West.

It is here at the loop that the height of the commercial mixes with the breath of the palatial. Sal and Faith moved to State Street to see the imposing brick building with enormous windows carved in Romanesque stylings across from the yellow brick more severe form with square-on-square tiny panes of glass. There were rows of trees down the middle to remind everyone that once this was a city and in the distant future possibly would be again. But for now, it is two lanes in each direction of traffic with the “L” above holding court. And perhaps it pronounced guilty on everything that saw except if there was no below there would be no above. Faith and Sal turned west up of East Van Buren Street only pausing to look in the Dunkin’ Donuts. Time to make the donuts. And went down into the night as the bridge crossed the street with light brown pylons as prospective was the grid, the grid of cars, the grid of city lights, the grid of overhead loops.

But then Sal thought he saw been in his ramshackle blue jeans but it could not be in it must not be him and yet it just might be him looking from out of the shadows. But then he disappeared. The question irked Sal: how could he know that he was in Chicago in this very place? Then he realized that the iPhone could pinpoint an exact location, and he had turned it on just to see the amazing world from the center. And he had never turned it off. So, Dean could know it he knew to use the locator. But it still might not have been Dean. It could have been any bird that sang ornithology.

“You’re seeing something what is it? You seemed disturbed by it.”

Sal took out his iPhone and tapped it twice. “Did you know that these can locate your position? I turned it on once upon a time just to see if it would work and I didn’t turned it off again. And I think Dean knows that and pinpoint where it is with the app.”

She looked into his face and saw that he was quite serious and even concerned not just for him but for her as well which made her feel safe in a paradoxical kind of way. She died in his arms today.

“Dean does not have the money even I could see that he let Alice pay for everything.”

“But what if Alice has the money? She just passed to convince Dean that it would be better for us to be removed than go out free and into this ugly twisted world.”

“Yes, Alice hates me but why have more bodies to her collection if they don’t say anything ever at all with complete silence and discretion.”

“Because, as one person so recently put it, she is a psychopath and thinks only of the end of that to her of having three keep a secret if two of them reside in the morgue. And with Alice, she has one picked out with style points. Because she cares.”

They moved between the pylons that had no pinpoint from the street discussing what to do and making their way back in a catty-corner catechism to where the car was parked. They knew they had to get out of this place. The square grid seemed to watch them, and Sal peered around every corner waiting for Dean to step out of the doors to every sort of industrial Corporation to reveal that it was all just a joke and they would have to come with Dean and not return. To go with Dean to that place where people do not return from except as ghosts.

But once they reached the car and piled in for dear life and then started to turn the key, because it was an old vehicle, they eased their breath and went out of the mud city with crud on their wheels and dirt on their headlights.

Faith looked back to see whether there was anybody following them but did not see anything suspicious. But there usually isn’t .

Then they were on I-90 towards the places that meant Sal was home by the sea—perhaps living in a cottage with white shutters.