“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said, before unlocking the car.
We rode back to the city that night without much discussion about what had happened. It was too exhausting, maybe, to parse. In any event, we were done with the suburbs. My father must have had to drive the car to work the next day looking the way it did, and I’m sure that didn’t sit well with him. But the gash in his chrome didn’t stay for long. As soon as there was time, he took the car over to the body shop at Sears and had it erased.
3
Somewhere along the way, my normally laid-back brother started to sprout worries. I can’t say exactly when or why this began, but Craig—the boy who could high-five and what-up his way around the neighborhood, who blithely catnapped anytime he had ten free minutes, regardless of his surroundings—grew more fretful and vigilant at home, convinced that catastrophe was creeping our way. In the evenings at our apartment, he rehearsed for every outcome, immersing himself in hypotheticals the rest of us found bizarre. Worried he’d lose his sight, he took to wearing a blindfold around the house, learning to navigate our living room and kitchen by feel. Worried he might go deaf, he began teaching himself sign language. There was also apparently the threat of amputation, prompting Craig to fumble his way through various meals and homework sessions with his right arm tied behind his back. Because you never did know.
Craig’s biggest fear, however, was also probably the most realistic, and that was fire. House fires were a regular occurrence in Chicago, in part due to slumlords who let their buildings slide into disrepair and were all too happy to reap the insurance benefits when a fire tore through, and in part because home smoke detectors were a relatively new development and still expensive for working-class people to afford. Either way, inside our tight city grid, fire was almost a fact of life, a random but persistent snatcher of homes and hearts. My grandfather Southside had moved to our neighborhood after a fire destroyed his old house on the West Side, though luckily nobody’d been hurt. (According to my mother, Southside stood on the curb outside the burning house, shouting for the firefighters to direct their hoses away from his precious jazz albums.) More recently, in a tragedy almost too giant for my young mind to take in, one of my fifth-grade classmates—a boy with a sweet face and a tall Afro named Lester McCullom, who lived around the corner from us in a town house on Seventy-Fourth Street—had died in a fire that also killed his brother and sister, the three of them trapped by flames in bedrooms upstairs.
Theirs was the first wake I ever attended: every kid in the neighborhood sobbing at the funeral parlor as a Jackson 5 album played softly in the background; the adults stunned into silence, no prayer or platitude capable of filling the void. There were three closed caskets at the front of the room, each one with a framed photograph of a smiling child on its lid. Mrs. McCullom, who with her husband had managed to survive the fire by jumping out a window, sat before them, so slumped and broken that it hurt to look in her direction.
For days afterward, the skeleton of the McCulloms’ burned-out town house continued to hiss and cave in on itself, dying far more slowly than its young occupants had. The smell of smoke lingered heavily in the neighborhood.
As time passed, Craig’s anxieties only grew. At school, we’d been put through the paces of teacher-led evacuation drills, dutifully enduring lectures on how to stop, drop, and roll. And as a result, Craig decided that we needed to step it up on safety at home, electing himself the family fire marshal, with me as his lieutenant, ready to clear exit pathways during drills or boss around our parents as needed. We weren’t so much convinced we’d have a fire as we were fixated on being ready for one. Preparation mattered. Our family was not just punctual; we arrived early to everything, knowing that it made my dad less vulnerable, sparing him from having to worry about finding a parking spot that didn’t require him to walk a long way or an accessible seat in the bleachers at one of Craig’s basketball games. The lesson being that in life you control what you can.
To this end, as kids, we ran through our escape-route possibilities, trying to guess whether we could jump from a window to the oak tree in front of the house or to a neighbor’s rooftop in the event of a fire. We imagined what would happen if a grease fire broke out in the kitchen, or if an electrical fire started in the basement, or if lightning struck from above. Craig and I had little concern about our mom in an emergency. She was small and agile and one of those people who, if her adrenaline got going, could probably bench-press a car off a baby. What was harder to talk about was Dad’s disability—the obvious but unstated truth that he couldn’t readily leap from a window like the rest of us, and it had been years since we’d seen him run.
Should things get scary, we realized, our rescue wouldn’t unfold the way rescues did in the tidy after-school movies we watched on TV. It would not be our dad who’d throw us over his shoulder with Herculean grace and carry us to safety. If anyone, it would have to be Craig, who would eventually tower over my father but was then still a narrow-shouldered, spindle-legged boy who seemed to understand that any heroics on his part would require practice. Which is why during our family fire drills, he started conjuring the worst-case scenarios, ordering my dad to the floor, instructing him to lie there limp and heavy as a sack, as if he’d passed out from smoke inhalation.
“Oh, good Lord,” Dad would say, shaking his head. “You’re really going to do this?”
My father was not accustomed to being helpless. He lived his life in defiance of that very prospect, assiduously looking after our car, paying the bills on time, never discussing his advancing multiple sclerosis nor missing a day of work. To the contrary, my father loved to be the rock for others. What he couldn’t do physically, he substituted with emotional and intellectual guidance and support, which is why he enjoyed his work as a precinct captain for the city’s Democratic Party. He’d held the post for years, in part because loyal service to the party machine was more or less expected of city employees. Even if he’d been half forced into it, though, my dad loved the job, which baffled my mother given the amount of time it demanded. He paid weekend visits to a nearby neighborhood to check in on his constituents, often with me reluctantly in tow. We’d park the car and walk along streets of modest bungalows, landing on a doorstep to find a hunched-over widow or a big-bellied factory worker with a can of Michelob peering through the screen door. Often, these people were delighted by the sight of my father smiling broadly on their porch, propped up by his cane.
“Well, Fraser!” they’d say. “What a surprise. Get on in here.”
For me, this was never good news. It meant we were going inside. It meant that my whole Saturday afternoon would now get sucked up as I got parked on a musty sofa or with a 7UP at a kitchen table while my dad fielded feedback—complaints, really—that he’d then pass on to the elected alderman who controlled the ward. When somebody had problems with garbage pickup or snow plowing or was irritated by a pothole, my dad was there to listen. His purpose was to help people feel cared for by the Democrats—and to vote accordingly when elections rolled around. To my dismay, he never rushed anyone along. Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people. He clucked approvingly at pictures of cute grandkids, patiently endured gossip and long litanies of health woes, and nodded knowingly at stories about how money was tight. He hugged the old ladies as we finally left their houses, assuring them he’d do his best to be useful—to get the fixable issues fixed.