Happy Baby

by Stephen Elliott

  By the time I step into the apartment, it’s late. The orange glow of the streetlights filters in around the drawn window shade. I’m relieved when I hear Maria’s breathing. Then I see the dark blue handprint on her shoulder. She’s lying in bed, staring at me. I peel my clothes off, fold them carefully into the milk crates, hang my jacket in the closet. In the bathroom I run the water and wait for it to get hot, then soak a towel with hot water and hold it against my face. I shave carefully with soap and my old razor. I cut myself only once. Then I pull the razor blade out and make a tiny cut on my shoulder. A thin, stinging cut. There’s hardly a drop of blood. Then I cut myself three times more, making a little tick-tack-toe board on my arm. I run my finger over the wound, push gently to make it hurt. Lean forward into the wall and push harder. Breathe in the tiles and the mildew, the smell of the sink. Breathe.

  I climb onto the mattress with Maria. She’s wearing scented lotion.

  “Did you do it?” she asks.

  She’s a silhouette. The sound of transactions on the street below filters through the window. We can always hear the noise from the streets. It’s one of the many reasons why the rent is so low.

  “We talked,” I say.

  She turns to me. Her soft arms and the web of veins running from her elbows. Her unshaven armpits. “That’s not what you said you were going to do.”

  “I wanted to.”

  She turns away from me, tucks her hands beneath her head. It’s gotten very late.

  “Don’t turn away from me,” I say, grabbing her hair tightly. She lets out a gasp and carefully backs her warm body into mine.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WHERE YOU COULD END

  THE SIGN READS No Parking First and Third Tuesday November thru April. I’m standing next to a newspaper box holding the pole. A police car drives past me, its wheels lifting and sliding on the ice before disappearing beyond the Pita House and the video store.

  The roads are covered in salt. I’ve been staying with my friend Jackson and I’m wearing his large red flannel jacket with the blue padding inside. I’m hoping he lets me keep it. It’s a comfortable jacket and I’d freeze otherwise. The wind is blowing. In the winter the wind-chill is the only measure that matters. I wish Maria would get here before the cold moves into me permanently.

  She approaches from the alleyway watching the ground and then looking up and waving. Maria wears blue leg-warmers and gloves with the fingers cut. She walks with her feet pointed away, like a duck. Back at her home she has a poster of Madonna over her bed, lying in a wedding dress, “Like a Virgin” written along the top. This is a dangerous spot for me, the girls’ group home just a block away. The staff there would recognize me, then call people who would force me into a car and take me somewhere, I’m not sure where. I’m not sure what they’d do. They’d lock me back in Reed and dope me full of Thorazine and sit me on a plastic couch in front of a television. Or they’d put me in Central Youth Shelter, thirty of us on mattresses on the floors. Gladiator arenas. Cut your face, cut your neck, steal your shoes. Hide in the corners, keep watch on all sides.

  Maria stops before the newspaper box and I come forward to meet her, draping myself across her shoulders and melting into her collarbone. I feel her arms searching my ribs. “Dodo head, it’s cold out here,” she says.

  “I should have checked the weather report this morning.”

  We sit in a booth at the back of the restaurant with a jug of coffee between us. “Do you want something to eat?” I ask. There’s a family at a table near the center of the restaurant, a large man and his two small children drawing on the table with crayons. I’m still shivering a little and trying to smoke my cigarette. I look across my shoulder to the parking lot. Lincoln Avenue ends at Lincoln Village, the last strip mall before the suburbs. All along Lincoln are the places we’re too young to go in, bars and truck stop motels. When I was eleven a man offered me $10 and took me to a hotel room on Lincoln. There was supposed to be a woman there, but there wasn’t. Nothing much happened. The men that were there, the ones with the money, the one in the nurse’s outfit, wanted a black boy, not a white boy, so they let me go.

  “I’m not eating,” Maria says. “I’m trying to lose weight.”

  The waitress tucks her pad into her apron, pulling the straps tight around her hips. “One hour time limit. Don’t forget.”

  “Listen,” I say to Maria. “A man goes to the doctor and he says, ‘Doctor, I’ve got this problem, I’m in love with my horse.’ And the doctor says, ‘Well, is it a male or a female?’ And the guy says, ‘It’s a female. What, do you think, I’m queer or something?’”

  Maria snorts and shakes her head at me. “Joker. You have to go back,” she says. “You’re going to get staffed out.” I’ve been gone eight days. After fourteen days it’s the policy of all state homes to staff the children out. Once you’re staffed out you can never get back in.

  “I failed my drug test,” I tell her, dumping a creamer into my coffee and sticking my spoon into the cup. I lift the cup with both hands and hold it in front of my face like my father used to.

  “Gee, how do you think that happened?” she asks.

  “They’re going to ship me to Prairie View for rehab.”

  Maria doesn’t say anything. She lives in Peterson, a converted three-flat for girls who weren’t adoptable. People joke that Peterson is a two-abortion home; girls with three abortions are sent somewhere worse. Every kid in the homes knows the different facilities you can be sent to. Prairie View is in the middle of the woods near the border with Wisconsin. There’s no getting out. The first week they lock you in a time-out room with a glass door and push food through the slot in the morning. You’re not allowed to talk to anybody. After that they come and ask if you’re ready to join the program. They leave you in the cage until you say yes sir or ma’am. Once in Prairie View you stay until you’re eighteen.

  “Do you think I could have a tomato juice?” Maria asks.

  I try to get the waitress’s attention.

  “Waitresses don’t like to wait on Mexicans,” she says. “They think we should be in the kitchen or bussing tables.”

  “If I go to Prairie View I’ll never see you again.”

  Maria thinks it over. “You only have a year and a half left. Then we’ll be eighteen and we can live wherever we want.”

  “Would you cook for me?” I ask.

  “I’m not a very good cook.”

  “What kind of apartment should we get?”

  “A big two-bedroom in a nice neighborhood.” Maria drinks her coffee black. “Paula’s been stealing my socks.”

  “Why?”

  “She says she doesn’t want to do laundry. She said if I tell anybody she’ll pull all my hair out.” Maria puts her coffee down and looks at the bus stand where an old man with a white sack is gripping the rail, trying to pull himself onto the first step. Maria leans forward over the table. “On the news last night they found two people frozen on Lower Wacker Drive.”

  “Since when do you watch the news? You don’t know that.” I pull the twenty-dollar bill Jackson gave me and lay it on top of the tab. “In Prairie View you’re not allowed to make phone calls. There’s no such thing as visitors. If you get angry the staff comes up behind you and pulls a paper bag over your head with a smiley face painted on it.”

  A grin spreads across Maria’s cheeks. “Could be an improvement,” she says. Whatever I say she’s always two answers ahead of me. “You have to go back. Look at it out there.” She cups her mug in both hands like me, the steam rising through her hair.

  There’s an alarm going off. Julie hurries from the bedroom into the bathroom, her shifting robe exposing her long pale legs.

  I think I see a white breast exposed in the open cloth. I sit up on the couch and rub my face. The alarm is still ringing, like a bell whistle. Then a bump, plastic breaking, and the alarm stops. It’s snowing. Across the way are enormous Section Eight tenements, windows ringed with black ash from old f
ires, the ledges now covered in snow.

  Jackson comes out of the bedroom buttoning the top of his jeans. Jackson’s got a face full of lumps and looks like he’s smiling even when he’s not. He looks like he got hit with a sack full of quarters. “You ready to make some money today?” he asks, standing in the hallway, waiting for his wife to come out of the bathroom.

  “We have to sit in the back of the truck?”

  Jackson sees beyond me, the snow falling in the backdrop. “Oh shit,” he says, rapping his knuckles against the bathroom door, then smacking the door with his open palm twice. “Get the fuck out of there already. Let’s go.”

  I first met Jackson and Julie near the end of summer at Julie’s brother’s house, just across the street from the new group home I had been moved to. Jackson, Julie, and Jon were standing in front of the construction truck, drinking. I was just getting home from school and I stopped in front of them and nodded toward the paper bag near the stairwell with cans of beer in it. “Can I have one of those?” I asked. They looked at me like I was crazy. Julie smiled.

  “Give the kid a beer,” she said. “It’s hot.”

  Later, inside Jon’s place, Jackson jerked his head toward the window, where we could see the group home across the street. “You live in that place?” he asked. Julie was dividing up lines of PCP. “You don’t have any parents?”

  “We should adopt him,” Julie said. I moved closer to her. She saw what I was doing and turned and blew smoke in my face.

  “Put him to work on the truck,” Jackson said. Everybody laughed, even me. They were pretty surprised when I showed up at their apartment three months later.

  Mr. Berry, Julie’s father, drives the small white construction truck. It’s seven o’clock when we arrive at an old bungalow near Sauganash. “Gonna be a quick day,” the old man says.

  Jackson surveys the house, his gloves on his hips. It’s snowing steadily. “We’ll just set a chicken ladder,” Jackson says.

  “Won’t the ladder slide off the roof?” I ask.

  “You want to work or not?” Mr. Berry asks impatiently. “I can take you home right now. Go on welfare like the rest of the fucking niggers.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “It’s called a chicken ladder for a reason, Theo,” Jackson says. “It’s for chickens. Chicken chicken chicken, beowk. ‘Sides, it’s not snowing that hard.”

  “This is nothing,” Mr. Berry says. “Pigeon shit.”

  We haul the sand and concrete mix from the truck. The barrow, hawks and slicks, buckets, roofing, tools. When we’ve got everything the old man gives a hard wave and takes off. Jackson lights a joint and hands it to me.

  “What are you going to do about school?” Jackson asks. He’s concerned in the mornings. I take a hit off the joint and hand it back to him.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “You want to end up like me?” Jackson asks. “I guess that’s not such a bad option.” He pinches the lit top of the joint and drops it in his pocket.

  I mix the cement while Jackson sets ladders. We each take a slop on our hawks and go to opposite sides of the house. To climb the ladders we lay the slick in the porridge and pull up with one hand. The first time I go my hand slides off and I feel a splinter lodge itself through my gloves. I lean my body into the ladder and try again. Eventually I forget the snow. There’s nothing else to do but cut the cement and paint it onto the cracks in the house, wiping the excess from the bricks until my gloves weigh ten pounds. I’ve been told by Mr. Berry and Jackson that if you don’t tuckpoint your house the house falls down. But Mr. Berry lives in an apartment. The old people in Sauganash certainly believe it; we come out here almost every day.

  It’s six at night and already dark when Mr. Berry comes to take us home. In the front of the truck, the heater blasting, crushed together, I’m trying to bite the splinter from my finger without banging my knee into the stick shift. I want to mention the short day but we’re not even done yet. We still have to rinse out the cement and wash the side of the truck. “Took a loss on this one, boys,” Mr. Berry says. “Have a better day tomorrow.”

  “This is all he gave you?” Julie asks, steering the light blue Chrysler from the side streets and onto the main road. “What did you do all day?”

  “Tuckpointing,” Jackson says, lighting a cigarette and handing it back to me. “The kid here did a good job today. There might be hope for him. It’s too early to tell.”

  Julie reaches to the dashboard for her own cigarettes. “Give me what you have,” she says, stretching her arm across the seat and tickling the bottom of my nose. I press my fifteen dollars into her palm. We drive the Lebaron down the length of Western Avenue to Humboldt Park and the buildings there; Mexico City, it’s called. The snow is getting heavier and the wheels part the slush toward the sewer vents. While we drive we sing the theme song from Sesame Street, shaking our arms and shoulders like muppets.

  I figure that with the weather so bad and the snow so heavy the store will be closed, which shows what I know. The man who’s always been there, standing on this street in a big round black jacket, approaches the car. Julie rolls down the window for him and he sticks his head into the vehicle, his hat pulled over his eyes and piles of snow in the stitching. “Go slow,” he says. “Police came through half an hour ago.” He cranes his head in the car and looks through the front window down the stretch. “You got anything for me?” He makes a small twitching motion.

  “Hard day,” Julie says, smiling as much as she can but it doesn’t come easy to her and it looks like it’s going to tear her face. Snow falls in the car where the man’s shoulders don’t block the doorframe.

  “Well that’s different, holmes. That’s different.” He pulls his body back yet still manages to be inside the car, his hands digging in his jacket pockets. Snow falls in a curtain past his face. “I don’t see how I can let you through. Not with the weather like this.”

  “C’mon,” Julie says, flakes settling on her wrist. “It’s a bad night. Tomorrow we’ll bring something for you.”

  “Yeah. Tomorrow. Where is that? Is that in the phone book? I’m having a hard night too. Look at this shit.”

  “Oh fuck!” Julie says, smacking her palms on the steering wheel, her hands scrambling through her jacket like mice. She pulls out a five-dollar bill and thrusts it at him. “Fucking take it then.”

  “OK,” he says. “OK. Take it easy.” He stands half a foot away from the car, tucking the money inside his sleeve and briefly looking around the street. “We’re all friends here. Let’s have a good time, make it an easy night. Right? Drive slow. Don’t freak anybody out.”

  Julie pulls over near the Z Frank car dealership and lays three lines on the dashboard, one noticeably smaller than the other two. The dealership light blinks on and off, sending waves of pink through the car. The pink highlights the veins in Julie’s long neck and Jackson’s apelike features. “You’re too young. You don’t want to get hooked on this shit,” Julie says, doing her line first, then handing it to Jackson. I have to climb up front to do mine, hanging with my ribs over the chairback. Jackson hands me his half straw. I try to remember which side he used, then snort it up anyway. The PCP burns. It feels like soap and rocks tumbling down the back of my throat, and it takes a little while before I get that cloudy feeling and things start to haze over.

  “Fucking Mexicans,” Julie says, remembering her $5. “You’d think they’d be happy we let them into the country. We need to close the fucking border.”

  “My girlfriend’s Mexican,” I say and Julie looks back at me, both of her hands clutching the wheel. Her face is like a cinderblock. Her lips roll over her gums, bright red daggers splitting her teeth, then it passes and her features soften.

  “That’s too bad,” she says, water rising to her pupils. “Too bad you have a girlfriend.” Julie smacks her lips. “Because I have a friend, don’t I, Jackson? Tracy. Yeah. She’s got a great ass. You would love her ass. I told her we have a sixteen-year
-old virgin sleeping on our couch. A little runaway, I said. And you know what she said? She’s twenty years old and when I told her you sleep in your jeans she was like, Oooh, I like virgins. She seemed really excited. I was going to invite her over tonight to listen to some music and party. But I guess I won’t. Unless you want me to. But if you have a girlfriend …”

  “Do whatever you want,” I say, my cheeks twitching. Jackson lets out one short, loud laugh.

  “You’ve got a lot to learn, bro.”

  “Just like the rest of them,” Julie says, jumping the car into gear. “So much for the innocent.”

  ***

  The blanket is wrapped around me and I’m cross-legged on the couch listening to the buzz of the phone on the other side. All of the doors in the apartment are closed. “Hello?”

  “Maria?”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “A little bit.” Julie and Jackson are in their bedroom now. They left an album playing on the stereo.

  “What’s that music?”

  “That’s Elvis.”

  “Oh. You shouldn’t call so late over here. It’s almost midnight. You’ll get me in trouble.”

  “Sorry. We’re getting up early again tomorrow.” Out of the window it seems the snow has stopped. The city is covered with thick yards of white. I hear a crash behind her voice. “What was that?”

  “Tamara and Jodie are fighting. I can’t stand it.” I picture Maria standing in the phone room, shaking her head, and the other girls breaking dishes and screaming just outside. Jodie is private and Tamara is a street fighter. I see Tamara pulling Jodie along by her hair, a dog on a leash.

  “I wish you were here,” I say. I hold the line, keeping my eye on the door to the bedroom. Maria doesn’t say anything. “I wanted to hear your voice.”

  “Here I am.”

  “I’m going to take care of you.”

  “Ha ha. Now I know you’re drunk.”

  “I mean it.”