Happy Baby

by Stephen Elliott

  “Cigarette?” I ask, taking the pack from my pocket. He takes the cigarette from me and tucks it behind his ear. He sits down across from me on the other side of the table. I light my cigarette and toss the lighter to him. “You might as well smoke it. They’re not going to let you take it back to the floor.” He must know this already. How could he not know that? Of course he knows. He’s been here weeks already. He considers the lighter but doesn’t take it. He leaves the cigarette behind his ear. Was I like this? No. I was scared and obedient. I would have smoked that cigarette down, hands folded into my lap, staring at the floor. And I would have said thank you. That’s the kind of child I was. People did whatever they wanted with me. George is strong and defiant. Fuck you, he’s saying, the way he crosses his arms across his small chest and stares at the locked door as if it was a personal insult, but he is stronger than the door and through his will he’s going to tear the door right from the hinges. There’s only one problem with his theory.

  “I have a whole pack,” I say and push them across the table to him. He picks the pack up, stuffs the lighter inside, and shoves the pack inside the waistband of his pants. Now he’s smiling, kind of like the child he is, curious to see what I’ll do. I’m not going to do anything. I’ll buy a pack at the convenience store where the shuttle stops. They’ll search him before taking him back. They’ll take his cigarettes from him and divide them amongst themselves. What the fuck, they’ll think. What kind of a caseworker would give a juvenile offender a pack of cigarettes?

  “So how are they treating you?” I ask. This is the refrain. I learned this over seven years. Every time I met a new caseworker they would ask me how I was being treated and I’d say “Fine,” instead of saying “I’m being raped.” I’d say “Good” instead of telling them the other boys jumped me and forced a bar of soap into my mouth. I’d say “OK,” instead of saying “I hate it here, they won’t let me go outside.” And they always ask the same question. They don’t change a single word. The administrators, guardians, caseworkers, volunteers, hospital staff. Always, “So how are they treating you?” Which is what I ask now, on the other side, but not really. I have a good idea how he is being treated. He’s not giving any back mouth to the guards and the guards are ignoring him. In the yard he stands near the pole. He’s getting in fights sometimes to prove himself to his gang. At school he’s in one of the classes for the kids that can’t sit still. I can see it all.

  “Listen, you know, I put a lot of effort into getting here today. How old are you?”

  “How old are you?” he blurts back. He’s gotten tired of the quiet game.

  “I’m twenty-three.”

  “I’m thirteen,” he says. Of course he is. It’s just the age.

  “When’s your court date set for?”

  “Don’t you know?” he asks. He’s suspicious. Children in this place are always suspicious.

  “I didn’t bring my papers with me, so I don’t know.” He shrugs his shoulders. OK. Fine. I lean back, he leans back. The light hanging over us is dim and fat. I’ve never been good with kids, not even when I was one. “Give me a cigarette,” I say. He looks like he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t even know why I’m here. I remember very distinctly standing on Petey’s bed two floors up, sometimes stepping on his legs, and looking out the window in our room through a patchwork of wire and saying to myself that if they ever let me out of this place I would never come back. But here I am. For what? To walk the red lines painted on the floor outside the classrooms. For this child who’s already stolen my cigarettes, who looks like all of the kids that used to spit on me and beat me up, a smaller version of Larry, the most fearsome kid in Western when I was here. The kid who eventually broke my leg, just days before they let me out. That’s what he looks like, this little bastard. He looks like Larry. I shake my head. Consider threatening him. It wouldn’t work. It’s what he wants. I went through all of this for George Washington. I bought these clothes, dark pants, button-up shirt. Cut my hair, bought this notebook. Took a day off of work, just so I could come here and give this thirteen-year-old asshole some information and now he won’t even give me one of my own cigarettes.

  “If you don’t give me a cigarette,” I say, finally, staring into the fixture and the black marks on the ceiling above it, “I’m going to leave, and you’re never ever going to find out why I came here or what I meant to tell you.”

  I can see him thinking about it. Curiosity is a weapon with children. Fear and longing for the unknown. What a horrible little room this is. Smells just like this place, too. Rooms smell different when you can’t get out. George relents. He takes the cigarette from behind his ear and rolls it across the table to me. I raise my eyebrow. He pulls the packet out from inside his pants, removing the lighter and placing it on the table then flicking it to me with his index finger. It slides across the table and lands in my palm and I light my cigarette with it and I slide the lighter back to him and he tucks it back in the pack and the pack back inside the waistband of his pants.

  “What you want to talk about?” he asks now, lightly drumming on his thighs. “Why you messin’ with me?”

  “The police,” I tell him. “I want to talk to you about the police.”

  Zahava was robbed a second time, just a couple of weeks later. But we weren’t there then. After work we had gone with some of the other restaurant employees over to Sunny’s house. There were drugs, as usual. Heroin and cocaine in little white paper packets. Everyone pitched in. Zahava went up and I went down and I was sitting against the wall and everything was in slow motion. Heroin is the only thing that makes me relax. Zahava likes cocaine. She likes to have a good time. It’s hurting her grades, she says. But she always wants to go out. She was chatting rapidly with Scales, the bartender. Once, when we were at a bar near Belmont, I saw Zahava tuck her hand into Scales’s back pocket. She has better posture than the rest of us, and I thought to myself, wrapped in my drug-induced blanket, staring at her thin frame and beaklike nose, that Zahava is a door. She is a bridge, a phone booth. Things would work out well if I stayed with her, I thought. She’d teach me how to be like her.

  When we came home in the morning my body felt like cake batter and Zahava was complaining of canker sores. Her gums were patterned with pink-lined white squares and there was blood around her teeth. I hadn’t been able to pee so I went to the bathroom. I stood in front of the bowl and waited. When I came out Zahava was staring at the wall with her hands on her hips, lightly biting at the inside of her mouth. Her stereo was gone, along with her music. “I hope they fry,” she said this time. “Why not just kill all of them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She looked at me like I knew what she was talking about and I shouldn’t act stupid. She poked her chin forward and reconsidered. “I don’t mean that. Really. I was just upset for a moment.”

  “I don’t care about police,” George says. He’s getting anxious. I can’t hold his attention. I’d think the ward would be unbearable for him, the small locked rooms, his eyes darting all over the walls.

  “If you don’t care about the police why do you tell them so much?”

  He shrugs his shoulders and knits his brow. He has a low hairline that starts almost immediately above his eyebrows. “I don’t know,” he says, angrily, because he doesn’t like that he’s been tricked and he doesn’t like that I’m telling him he’s been tricked. It may be too late. He doesn’t know his court date. Maybe it’s already passed. They tried him, found him guilty, decided his fate, and he’s sitting here waiting for it, waiting for it to come down on his neck like a mousetrap. And it will. They’ll split him wide open. But even so. There are other mistakes to be made. No matter how much they pull you apart there’s always room for another mistake, there’s always something left.

  “You think the police are your friends?” I ask him. “Is that why you tell them so much?” His eyes are really darting now and his legs are shaking and his thumb is beating the table.
Sure, what’s so hard about getting a confession from this kid? Leave him in a small room and wait for him to lose his mind. I stub my cigarette out. I feel almost dizzy, slightly nauseous. My tongue sticks and the roof of my mouth is thick and wet. There’s a sharp pain in the back of my head wrapping itself around my ears like a steel belt and I press my palm against my forehead to relieve the pressure.

  “No. I hate the police,” he says.

  The third time Zahava was robbed the robbers were caught. The landlady had drilled a wooden plank into the living room floor to keep the patio doors from opening. So they broke the window. It was daytime. The police were waiting for them or the neighbors had been put on alert and were watching. The robbers were ambushed or caught walking away. The police were called and they responded. “They always return,” the police officer told us, standing in a pile of glass in the front room. “Creatures of habit. They catch themselves.”

  There were two robbers. An older man, past forty, a career criminal, just out of the can for the third time. And with him a young first-time offender named for a general who led his country against the English. And the child had a gun in his belt.

  The burglars were taken to the Twenty-Fourth District police headquarters on Clark Street, a single-floor black metal building responsible for all of Rogers Park. There they were separated. I could trace their steps from the backseat of the car, a sun-filled parking lot shining with blue and white stripes, through the thick steel doors. I know what the room looked like where they sat the younger one and handcuffed his wrist to the loop in the wall. He was sitting on the bench between two desks, his hand raised like he was giving an oath. At one of the desks would be a plainclothes juvenile officer and a typewriter, and at the other a snarling blue jacket with horrendous skin and a tightly clipped brown beard. The bench would have been painted white for no discernible reason and bolted to the wall by two long chains. Next to the plainclothes would be the cell. The door to the cell would be open, offering a view of a clean steel cot and a toilet. And this is where young George Washington would spend the first night of his journey into the whirlwind.

  First there would be questions. Legal counsel was not going to be an option. There was no right to remain silent. But maybe he wouldn’t talk for a while. Not until the blue jacket punched his face a couple of times. Or maybe he would talk right away, while the juvenile officer typed. Because he doesn’t care, because he’s sure he’s stronger than them and they can’t do him any harm anyway so what does it matter. He’s wrong about that. So they ask him if he was there all three times the apartment was robbed and he candidly responds yes. And they ask him if he had a gun on him then too. And he says yes. The police officers are nodding encouragement. He’s getting excited. He’s surging with his own invincibility. And then they tell him there were two people sleeping that first time they robbed the apartment. How did he feel about that? He shrugs his shoulders. He doesn’t feel anything about that. What if one of them had gotten up? What if they had been discovered robbing the apartment? What then? What would he have done if one of the occupants had come out of the bedroom to see what all of the racket was or to use the bathroom? What then? And George Washington pondered his answer for a moment, growing stronger and nodding his head. The air was rushing into his lungs. He was going to peel the roof from the police station and pull the rest of it to the ground.

  “I would have shot them dead,” he replied.

  “I’ll go take a look.”

  “Don’t bother. Stay here,” she said, holding my hand.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  I think about asking for another cigarette but don’t bother. “The police,” I say. I’m sweating but it’s not hot in this room. “Why did you tell them that?”

  “Tell them what?”

  “That you were going to shoot us. That you were going to shoot the occupants of the bedroom if they walked out of the room? You threw it all away. Why did you say that?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter.” I wish there was a window in this room or less light but there isn’t. “It matters,” I say. “They’re going to use that against you. They put it in your report. They told the people that live there you said that. They met them right outside of their building and they said they had caught the robbers and that the youth had a gun and he had intended to use it had they caught him. That means for sure it’s in your paperwork. And the prosecutor is going to present that to the judge. And you are never going to get out. You are never going to go home again. You will be here until you’re eighteen and possibly longer if they can figure a way. Because it’s a different crime now. You’ve elevated the crime. You’re no longer eligible for placement. Who can even imagine what they’re going to call that, the places you’re going to be. They’re going to hold you until you’re eighteen.”

  George’s hair and eyebrows come together. He blows air into his cheeks. “Fuck you,” he says.

  “Fuck me? Fine. Fuck me. Don’t talk to any more cops. You understand?” I realize that I’m shaking the table so I grip the table harder and shake it as hard as I can. “I don’t care if they smack you with spoons, stick a hook in your penis, or what they threaten you with. You wait. Don’t trust any of them. Not the teachers, not your guardian, or the guards or the lawyers. Definitely not the social workers or anyone who presents themselves to you as your therapist. That’s a setup. They’re out to get you. They fucking hate you.”

  He’s crying now. I’m making him cry. “They are out for you. They don’t give a shit about you. You’re just food to them. They’re going to eat you alive. And if a judge asks you, if you even get that chance, which you probably won’t. But if you ever do, if the judge brings you into the courtroom. If a judge asks you if you were really there that first time and if you had a gun then you say no. You hear me? You say no. You say it wasn’t even your gun. You were just carrying it for the other man. The older man. You were carrying it for him. It was his gun. Do you get that now?”

  He’s sitting upright. Tears are streaming from his hard eyes. The tears keep running, pouring over his cheeks, snot hanging from his nose, water dribbling over his chin, soaking the collar of his shirt, forming small puddles on the table. I sit and I wait. I can’t let the guard see this. I have to be careful. I have to wait and then I have to go. I’ll never make it out again. No one will protect me. I’m going to stand up and ring the bell and leave, let me out let me out, and that’s the last I’m going to see of this place.

  The stairs are long and empty. They never search you when you leave. I keep my hands just outside of my pockets. I walk the stairs and pass the guard and his metal detector. A funny thought occurs to me of putting a bomb together while inside and walking right out with it into the hot air and blowing up the rest of the world.

  Western is twenty-three hundred west and eleven hundred south. Where I live is far north, east of the train tracks, near the lake and the suburbs, but not quite at either. I’ll have to take three buses to get home. The heat attacks me. The exhaust sticks in thick grey streaks to the sides of white delivery trucks. As I’m walking away from the building my pace is quickening. I’m so afraid. I keep imagining that I was caught, even though I wasn’t. It’s like falling from a window. I’m walking faster, unbuttoning my shirt. Taking my shirt off, popping a button, wiping my face with my shirt. I’m running stripped to the waist. I’m running as fast as I can past the people waiting for a bus and the Payless shoe store. I’ll yell. I’ll get somewhere alone and I’ll yell. I’m moving around the pedestrians, jumping into the gutter and then back onto the pavement.

  “Ain’t nobody chasing you,” a man leaning next to a newspaper box yells after me. I stop and turn to look at him. He’s a large man and his sweat has made his striped shirt transparent over his dark belly. He’s laughing, turning a toothpick in his teeth, jingling some keys in his pocket. There’s a wire garbage can nearby. A woman standing in the shade of a thin tree is turned slightly
away from me, a smile playing beneath the dew of sweat on her lips.

  CHAPTER SIX

  STALKING GRACIE

  IT’S 6:30 IN the morning, and Maria is still asleep. I’m awake before the alarm goes off, but I don’t move yet. Her back, with its thick pale scar, is pressed against my chest. I have to be careful when I get up. If I move too quickly, Maria will startle awake and want me to stay, and I can’t miss another day of work. We can’t afford that. I want to get inside her now, but I resist.

  Our place is on the north side of Chicago, in an area known alternately as Rogers Park and the Jonquil Jungle. There are thirteen apartments on every floor. We live on the third floor, in a small room with a kitchenette, a half fridge, and one window, but we have our own bathroom. The paint in the hallways is dark red and cracked. The girls that work the sidewalk in front of the bookstore on Howard all live here, five or six to a room. They bring their customers in and out, and their customers come from everywhere. We’ve changed the locks on the door three times.

  I raise the window shade to let in a little light and pull on my pants. I boil water in a saucepan, fill my coffee cup, two spoonfuls of instant coffee one spoonful of creamer, and sit at our table. We just moved in here when Maria turned eighteen. My caseworker told me they’re replacing the furniture at the day center, so Maria and I might get a new table and some other stuff this weekend.

  Maria sleeps naked on the mattress a few feet away. The blanket has slipped off her shoulder, and her breast is exposed. She looks as if she’s having good dreams. This is rare. Normally the blanket is pulled tight around her shoulders, gripped in bunches. She sleeps with her eyes pressed shut and her mouth wide open, and she talks in her sleep.