“You’re white as a ghost.”
I blinked. The sun seemed brighter than it’d been. There was Helen, holding her bag. Others circled her feet. The sack I’d brought had only a poster of the girls. A blanket and a change of trousers. A square of soap. “I’m not used to the place is all.”
“I supposed you’d be long gone,” Helen said. She tapped the watch on her wrist. That blank space in my head, sometimes I lost minutes to it.
“Tell you what,” Helen said. “You help me with these bags and I’ll give you something for your pocket. My sister can’t lift a spoon.”
“I couldn’t take money from you, ma’am. I’d do the bags for the rolls.”
“That was a favor you did me, eating those. And look at you.” She touched my forehead.
“I’ll be all right.”
“Hot as a gourd. I’ll give you something for a good meal. Just a dollar for help with the bags. Any more and my sister will think I’ve gone loony.” She studied me. “You don’t know where your sisters are, do you?”
I wiped at my eyes.
“Are they together?”
“We think so.”
“Do you have an address?”
I shook my head.
“Where do they work? Do you even know that?”
“Sorry, ma’am.”
She stepped back and squinted at me. “Are they as young as you, these sisters?”
I nodded.
“They’re even younger, aren’t they?”
“Afraid so.”
“My dear, dear boy. You’re lost as a pup. You’ll never find them here.”
A trembling worked in my insides. That buzzing in my head, it was more than engines. I slumped against the wall and closed my eyes.
“Oh now, I didn’t mean to scare you worse,” Helen said. A car pulled up behind us and she gave it a glance. The car was running, but the sister didn’t get out. Helen lifted my chin. “The factories, that’s where you should start. Back of the Yards, in New City. Might take you hours to walk it, but the elevated is terrible for nerves, cost you some pennies too. You’re young enough to go without it. Then I’d try the boardinghouses. If they’re here at all, that’s the only proper place for a girl to find sleeping quarters.” Eyeing the car, she opened her purse and drew out a map. She pressed it flat against her thighs. “Look,” she said and pointed. “There’s the yard. That’s the closest of the factories at least, though there’s hundreds. And up here, whole streets of houses for workers. The Germans. ” She stopped. I nodded it was all right. “. They’re the ones who tend to the Near North Side. Or at least they did.”
Helen eyed the car again. The sister had rolled her window down. “I’ve got to go.” She put the map in my coat pocket and I helped with her bags. When I closed the car’s boot, I was a run of sweat. But for those minutes of lifting, I knew the work even if I didn’t know anything else. Helen opened her purse and dropped a dollar in my hand. Too much for bags.
“Lee, you’re a good boy,” she said. “I know you won’t listen, but I think you should leave those girls be. Go home. They’re surely here for their own reasons. You have to take care of yourself.”
She got in the car and went off, waving to me before she was out of sight. I pulled the map from my pocket. It was worse than ten years old and thin as a leaf. In the corner the words chicago title and trust co. in red ink. Circles in the same ink grew around a center point. A mile marked by one circle. Two miles by one bigger than that. It was to that center point Helen thought I should be going. A place of some importance with so many street crossings, the names crowded and hard to read. Still, a good half of the map was nothing but white, and inside that, the words lake michigan.
I folded the map straight, careful not to rip the edges. I thought of what Helen had said about home. It was late morning on the farm. Nan would be in the garden, readying the winter vegetables for canning. She’d rake hay over the rest. After their chores, Patricia and Agnes would come in for noon dinner. Ray after that. But Father wouldn’t. He’d stay in his room until dark. Maybe he’d go sit in his dugout. At the table, they’d have five empty places. One for Father. One for Mother. Two for the girls and one for me. If I could, I’d take four of those empty places back. Lee, Esther had asked. You know how to trick that lock, don’t you? If a girl asked for it?
The doctors said I’d been in the hospital from fall to spring. Half a year, they’d said. I couldn’t account for that. They said I’d have some trouble accounting for many things. I’d want to keep clear of noise, not work too hard when I got home. But home was work, I said back.
Now Chicago, that was work and noise both, and I’d been in the place only hours. I raised my collar to my ears. The city felt used. The men walked with their hats low, the women with purses tight to their elbows. Trains rattled overhead, fast with the smell of oil, the streets beneath shadows. Along every window and in the alleys, gray spots of snow. By midafternoon, my map was a sore piece of paper and I’d searched only a few blocks. The factories in the yards were wide and long as fields. High as three houses put together, sometimes more. The windows on the upper floors looked dark. The glass up there hardly bigger than a porthole, but what a noise. I imagined whole rows of engines behind those walls. Lines of wheels, pistons, and belts. And such a whir, the whole building breathing together. I breathed hard myself. Back of the Yards was a funny name, but it felt right. Nothing save brick and stone. Everyone was at work inside.
A whistle sounded above my head. I ducked into an alley to make it less. Minutes later, every door in the yard opened and out they rushed. Noon break. I stayed in the alley to let the men pass. Their hair was thick with a sticky kind of dust, their faces too. They walked and rubbed their eyes as if they didn’t have time enough. Soon the yard emptied, all but a circle of men standing for a smoke. They gave me a look and I nodded. They didn’t nod back. Not one of them seemed ready for talking. Least about two missing girls.
A hard place. Harder than I’d thought. The sun was high but the streets felt cold as knuckles. A whistle went off, my ears a drum, and the men filed in. Long through the afternoon I watched for another break, tracing one block after the next. At a store, I bought a spot of bread. Some cheese and a pickle. The man who sold it wore an apron over his front, and he dropped the change in my fingers like so much trash. “Here on business?” he asked. I thought of pulling the posters out, but the man only frowned.
“Just seeing the place,” I said.
“Best you keep to the Loop. Only workers here and only on breaks. We price for them. With the factories’ help. The unions don’t like a spare man wandering around, buying up someone else’s bread.”
I let myself out. When I looked back, the man stood at his window, arms crossed.
The afternoon was getting late. That whir from the factories, it never did let up. The light between the buildings grew heavy and still it was cold. It was colder when a person wasn’t working, only walking about. The city was more than wind. Ugly with the sound. The pictures in the magazines, they’d looked washed clean. But here the streets were something different. They flattened every hill, constant as netting. And that dust, thick in the men’s ears, thick in their hankies. Worse than any chaff in the barn. Finally, the whistle sounded again. A stream of men and women broke around me as if I was a stone. I couldn’t get up my voice to ask questions, not with those faces. And not a one of them looked like my sisters, uniforms or not. In only minutes the workers were gone again. Then it was dark.