The West Side was still closed to local traffic, so I went as far as I could on the Ike. A handful of people were parked on the side of the road. They had coffee and cameras with long lenses. I had a flat bottle of Knob Creek in a paper bag. I pulled it out of the glove compartment and twisted off the cap. My eye followed the angle of the sun as it sliced up the highway. I thought about Wilson and felt the quicksand under my feet. Then I looked down at the bottle. Neat, square, and more than willing to help me dig the hole a little deeper. I shoved it back into the bag. Then I turned off the car and got out.
A middle-aged man was dressed in jeans, a black peacoat, and gloves with no fingers. He had a Sox hat on backward and was looking through the viewfinder of a Canon.
“What are you shooting?” I said. He answered without taking his eye from the camera.
“The fences. They’re taking them down.” The man got his shot and stepped back. “Want to take a look?”
The lens was marvelous, the early morning light saturated with a rosy dust rising off the street. Five men worked along a fence line. Two wore heavy gloves and cut away curlings of concertina wire. The other three rolled up a length of fencing and carried it to a waiting truck. Behind them, a run of bare poles marched across the flat landscape. A soldier with a rifle watched. None of the workers wore NBC suits. The soldier was dressed in full protective gear.
“The regular media is focusing on the main gates,” the man said. “Government started taking them down last night. But I like it here.”
“What have you seen?”
“People going in on foot. Started first thing this morning.”
“Residents?”
The man chuckled as I handed him back the camera. “Real estate. I had coffee with a guy. Irishman named Flynn. Had a paper bag full of hondos. Said he had two hundred on him.”
“Two hundred thousand?”
The man nodded and reached into his camera bag for a lens. “Said he was gonna buy up a couple blocks’ worth of graystones near Garfield Park. Cash on the barrel. Had lists of owners, blank deeds, powers of attorney. Everything he needed.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Tell me about it. Said he could get stuff for next to nothing. Hell, they’ll still be pulling bodies out of the basement, and this guy will be moving in.”
My new friend wiped the lens clean with a soft cloth and snapped it on.
“What do you do with them?” I said and nodded at the camera.
“The photos? I take them for myself. Sometimes, I’ll sell a shot to the papers.”
“Nice.”
“History,” the man said. “Every bit of this is history. The most underreported event in the annals of modern journalism. Very few pictures. No video I know of that wasn’t shot by the government. No one to bear witness.”
“Just the people who lived through it.”
“That’s right. And who believes that shit?”
The man popped off a couple shots of a news chopper drifting overhead, then returned to the fence line. I watched for another ten minutes, not sure why I was there and knowing I needed to be somewhere else. Then I shook the photographer’s hand. He offered to send me some prints if I was interested. I told him I was and gave him my card.