She shook her head. “I wish I knew. Everyone is trying to cash in on the economic boom that’s supposed to come to the South Side when the Obama Center goes in, but this landfill proposal came out of nowhere. Mona and her gang are pitching it as a goodwill gesture to the community, a new beach like the one they put in at Thirty-first Street. Even so, that isn’t something they should build without public hearings, and this is the first we’ve heard about it.”
She stopped and eyed me narrowly. “What’s your interest in this?”
“Just a curious bystander. I grew up in South Chicago and I vaguely remember SLICK from when U.S. Steel was closing the South Works plant. SLICK had a plan for repurposing the site, but I don’t think they ever got funding for it.”
The woman grimaced. “Name of the song for getting the city to invest in the South Side. Big plans and nothing ever comes of them. The same thing may happen to this little beach proposal, but Coop—the guy who got hustled out just now—seems to think it’s more than that. Or maybe he resents any change to the lakefront. Some people do.”
“Who is Coop?”
“You could say he’s a professional protestor, except that would imply someone’s paying him. But no one really knows who he is. He showed up a year or so ago with a big dog. He seems to spend his life walking up and down the lakefront with it. He apparently spends a lot of time in the library studying up on the history of the lakefront parks—he knows more about Burnham than I do. Than Mona and her cronies do, for that matter.”
“The meeting seemed chaotic,” I said. “Is Leo in charge of SLICK’s planning? Is that why he was making the presentation?”
She pulled a face. “Oh, no. It’s typical chaos where SLICK is concerned. They got some kind of grant to digitize their maps and so on, which Leo did for them. Mona tried making the presentation, but she couldn’t figure out how to run PowerPoint or to match her remarks with the slides. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so pathetic, but they had to ask the young man to take over.”
I was just as glad I hadn’t been in the room for that part of the meeting. I wondered about the woman’s interest—she apparently knew a lot about Park District plans.
“I’m just a local resident. Tired of SLICK being a mouthpiece for the Park District without taking the neighborhood wishes into account. The landfill may be a good idea, but it’s like everything else in this town—no transparency. Decisions made in private meetings where money changes hands. I’ve lived here for fifty-three years. I’m tired of it.”
She spelled her name for me, Nashita Lyndes. I handed her one of my cards, which identifies me as an investigator.
“An investigator?” She brightened. “Were you here to dig up information on the city’s plans?”
“Sorry, Ms. Lyndes: I was here with the soccer players. Anyway, trying to find information on anything this city is planning would require a nuclear-powered shovel. A mere steam-powered machine couldn’t handle the job.”
2
Savages
Bernie had come back into the room, not looking for me, but to talk to Leo. She seemed to be pleading with him about something; he looked at the SLICK officers and shook his head regretfully.
“Some people are born without spine,” she said as she joined me at the back of the room.
“And it’s your job to inject a few bone cells to stimulate growth?” I said sardonically.
“If it would work!”
Bernie ran to catch up with her team, which was heading to the parking lot of a large strip mall on Forty-seventh Street. I followed more slowly: she had to make sure her girls were leaving with a responsible adult.
When she’d finished, her mouth and her shoulders drooped. “These girls, they were my whole life for nine weeks and now, poof! It’s over, they’re gone, as if it had never happened.”
“You start another segment next week, right?” I asked.
“At a West Side park. I begged to stay with these girls, but the Park District has no more money for programs in this neighborhood.”
I shared her outrage: the city can come up with funds for landfill and a new beach but not for a group of African-American and Latinx girls.
“Aren’t they going out for pizza? Why don’t you join them—they adore you, they’d love to have you there.”
“It’s not organized. Some will go with their families tonight, but others are saving their coupons for later.”
“Peter’s buying me a birthday drink at Sal’s before dinner. Want to join us?”
Peter was Peter Sansen, the archaeologist I’d been going out with for the last few months. Sal’s was the Golden Glow, the bar owned by an old friend of mine.
“Your birthday! Ma foi—je suis crétin! I forgot. Of course I will come.” She grinned roguishly. “And I will be very tactful and let him take you to dinner alone. Anyway, later on, Angela and I are going roller-skating with the rest of our group.”
Angela Creedy, one of Northwestern’s basketball stars, was sharing an apartment in a rickety Victorian house with Bernie and two other student athletes.
As we walked to the car, Bernie enthralled me with her shrewd decisions in today’s game.
Time was when Forty-seventh Street mostly held bars and tiny shops that catered to Bronzeville, back when the Loop banks gouged African-Americans and the downtown shops barred them from the premises—except, of course, as janitors. Now there were blocks of new housing, big impersonal chain stores, gyms, and a giant liquor outlet, which had hastened the death of the old bars.
Houses and shops ended at the Illinois Central railroad tracks, the eastern boundary of the neighborhood, but the street itself continued east under the tracks, feeding into Lake Shore Drive. Between the Drive and the railway embankment was a narrow strip of land being returned to prairie; the parking lot I’d used lay there.
As we headed under the tracks, we heard the kind of hollow tinkling made by a xylophone, discordant, disturbing.
At six o’clock, runners, cyclists, picnickers were thick on the ground, heading through the viaduct to a footbridge that crossed the Drive. Someone wearing headphones and pushing a runner’s baby buggy bumped into me and swore at me. I moved closer to a pillar and finally saw where the music was coming from: a figure shrouded in gray, bent over a red plastic piano, like the one Schroeder plays in Peanuts. Like Schroeder, the figure was getting an amazing amount of sound out of the toy.
I hadn’t heard her when I walked under the viaduct earlier in the afternoon, but she clearly had set up housekeeping there. If she’d been asleep earlier, I suppose her gray rags had blended into the gray underpass.
I was trying to push Bernie along, but she was listening wide-eyed to an ominous rhythm the pianist was producing in the instrument’s lowest octave.
“Do you hear that?” she demanded. “It’s ‘Savage.’”
I shook my head, uncomprehending.
“How are you not knowing it? It’s the greatest song of the last ten years, about this woman Indian chief. Her name was Anacaona, and the Spanish murdered her when she wouldn’t be their whore. My whole high school sang it for First Nations Day, but it’s so much more than that. Like, for women, when we have a march, to protest rape or the horrible incel bastards, we drum and we sing it. Who is playing this song in this place? Is there a protest? Should we be joining?”