Happy Baby

by Stephen Elliott

  “You know what?” he says. I don’t answer. We pass Soldier Field, then the McCormick Center. “I have fifty other kids like you I’m responsible for. You all think you’re special. You should try paying rent, see what that’s like. You get a roof over your head, three meals a day. Try working for DCFS—you don’t know the meaning of the word underfunded. Working for DCFS is like trying to convince someone to sell you a shirt for a dime. So don’t look at me like that. Where you’re going, we’ve decided, is a good place.”

  “Who decided?”

  “The judge.”

  I think I’m hungry but I’m not sure. I’m hungry and nauseous. I wonder what that judge looked like. I’ve been at court four times but only once taken inside the courtroom. I was in court number six, which is one they use for custody hearings involving the state. If the hearing is between parents it happens in courtrooms nine through twelve. We’re not supposed to be allowed in court but they brought me in.

  The lawyer for the state looked like a lumberjack. He wore a red shirt and a beige jacket, and he said my name while pulling a manila envelope out of a suitcase. I was standing only one person away from him but he didn’t even look at me. He’d probably been carrying me in his suitcase for weeks. As far as he and the rest of them were concerned I was that envelope. He handed it to my guardian ad litem, who opened it and looked inside like he’d dropped a quarter, then turned it over to the judge. The judge opened it and started to read the pages, moving her lips but not saying anything, occasionally underlining something. Everybody stayed quiet while she read; nobody looked at each other. There weren’t that many pages, maybe ten. At one point she looked confused and rubbed two fingers across her eyebrows.

  “What’s it say?” I asked.

  “Who the fuck let him in here?” the DCFS lawyer said. The judge peered up from the papers, fixing me for a second over her glasses, then returned to her reading. My guardian put his hand on my shoulder and an officer escorted me out of the courtroom and sat me on a bench.

  “Sit here,” the officer said, then walked away.

  I’ve heard of other kids being brought into the court. I heard of one kid who was left in one of the courtrooms after the building had closed and they found him there in the morning, sleeping in the bailiff box, and brought him upstairs to the detention center.

  I sat there for half an hour and I guess I thought I was going to get out that day. I thought that’s why I had been in the courtroom, but when my guardian came to get me he told me not to worry, then walked me back up the stairs to the detention center. I shouldn’t have been surprised. That night Mr. Gracie slid his key into my door. Petey stayed sleeping, his large back facing the room. In the last office on the floor, under a single unprotected lightbulb, I took my clothes off and folded them into the corner. Mr. Gracie lifted my chin and asked me what was wrong. “You look like somebody stole your candy.” I started to cry for the first time since the state took custody of me. Once I started I couldn’t stop. I didn’t know where it was coming from but I felt like I had failed everybody. He kept his hand over my face, barely covering my mouth and nose. “This is the place for that,” he said. “Go ahead and cry here.” When I finally stopped he waited a second, wiping my face with his palm. “Are you done?” I nodded and he slapped me hard. “Be quiet now.” He gripped my hair and pulled me across the steel table until the table edge was against my thighs. “Don’t move at all.” The next day I could still feel his hand across my face. Soon after that he stopped coming to work.

  At 55th Street we turn inland past the Museum of Science and Industry and the school buses in the parking lot. There’s a sign with Jimmy Carter’s face graffitied over with a six point star. “You have a girlfriend?” my caseworker asks. I wonder if he knows anything at all about what happens in a juvenile detention center.

  “I don’t,” I say.

  “You gay?”

  “No.”

  “I just broke up with my girlfriend,” he says, taking the unlit cigarette out of his mouth. “Get this. She’s been with her roommate the whole time we’ve been together. I mean, it wasn’t her roommate at all, it was her boyfriend, they were living together, trying to have children. Serious. She never wanted me to come over to her place but I insisted so finally she had me over for lunch. We’re having soup and this guy just walks in and introduces himself as Sandra’s boyfriend. We were having lunch in his house—I guess she didn’t expect him to come home. He didn’t know either. And you know what she says? She says ‘I guess I screwed up.’ She guesses she screwed up. We were both dating the same woman for nearly two years. Can you believe that? You think that kind of stuff only happens on television but it happens in real life too.” He puts the cigarette back in his mouth and looks to me for a response.

  “That sucks,” I say.

  “Sucks is right. You’ve never been lied to until you’ve been lied to by a woman. I should take you to see her, then you’d know what a bitch looks like. That could be some useful knowledge as you get older. Save you some heartache.” He nods his head as if it was attached to his neck by a spring. “That’s what I should do alright.”

  We pass Cottage Grove, then the north-south train tracks. The buildings deteriorate the further we get from the lake until the landscape is unrecognizable. The streets are rubble, old unlived-in three-flats missing walls and roofs, bricks in the gutters. This must be what it looks like after a war. At Washington Park he finally lights his cigarette. “Can I have one?” He looks at me with his cigarette bit between his teeth, then reaches into his shirt and hands me a cigarette and holds out his own so I bend to light mine from the tip of his. He smells like a tin can, and while I’m leaning toward him he turns and I bump my head against his shoulder. “Watch yourself,” he says.

  After the park the street signs disappear and the projects start and the giant building shadows cover the gravel lots and stores with no names on them except the names spraypainted on their side. “If they knew anything they’d level this fucking zoo.”

  People are everywhere, standing next to headless poles on the sidewalks, kneeling over dice and stacks of coins, crossing the street, ignoring the cars. Some people aren’t wearing shoes; others are wearing bathrobes. Nobody seems to care. He’s getting nervous. His orange lips turning pink. We pass an empty playground, a blur of paint splashed over iron and rubber, and enter a side street where the car dips hard in a pothole, the carriage banging over the asphalt, and I put both hands against the dashboard as the tremors pass through the frame. Then we stop at a driveway in front of a square red house with a front yard full of dirt. Three boys sit on the porch below a sign that reads STEVENSON HOUSE. My caseworker pulls the keys and they rattle in his hand. “Shit.” He takes a deep breath. He’s deciding whether to get out of the car with me or whether to just tell me to go and drive away. He can’t wait to be rid of me so he can get back to his girlfriend and his own problems but I don’t care. I know this is a bad place. I also know it’s better than the place I left behind. I stretch my arms out to him and he leans away first before moving forward to unlock my wrists. He takes his handcuffs back, fastening them inside his jacket.

  “Here,” he says, offering me another cigarette. I take it from him and slide it behind my ear. I wait with him, the car heating up. “Tell them I had a meeting and I’m sorry I wasn’t able to come inside.” We sit for what feels like a long time without talking before I finally reach for the handle. I get out of the car, rubbing my wrists, and shut the door behind me. One of the boys picks up a small rock and throws it lazily in my direction. The stone bounces past my foot, pinging against a hubcap.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE YARD

  AT NIGHT, WHEN our door is locked, we aren’t supposed to be talking. We’re supposed to be sleeping. I stand over Petey, naked except for my underwear. The springs creak and I hold my breath before placing my hands on the sill. We can never tell if they can hear us or not. Through the window I make out the dark outline of the Henry
Horner housing projects, the sharp corners facing Western, and some of the dull grey towers of the University campus and its cement bridges crossing between the building’s top floors. I think about University sometimes but I would never go to a school near here. If I ever get out I’ll go somewhere far away, another city on the edge of the country.

  “See any birds?” Petey asks in a low whisper. He turned sixteen yesterday, three years older than me, but we don’t celebrate birthdays here. “Anything?” Petey lies under his blanket, his legs inches from my feet. I think about stepping on his ankles for some height.

  “I can see the Circle Campus. And the highway. Same stuff. That’s the Roosevelt entrance,” I tell him, nodding toward something he can’t see. “Goes straight to Wisconsin.”

  Petey shifts below me and I catch his sour odor escaping from under his blanket. “Be careful,” Petey says. Things have been tense recently, more than usual. There have been rumors. Not that anyone talks to us. But you can’t help but hear in the school, or in food line, people whispering threats to one another. We listen for footsteps, for a trustee or a guard to swing the door open and pull one of us out of the room. I think about the door opening all the time, even when I’m on the other side of it. Petey does too. That’s why he wets his bed.

  Petey stares at me with his huge misshapen head. I try to see further. I love the streets. I can name every fourth street in Chicago. I wasn’t looking out of this window until recently, when we began to talk. Now I climb on his bed every night to look outside and when I’m looking outside I want to jump up and down on the bunk, but I don’t.

  Before, I didn’t want to talk to Petey because of the way he looks and the way he smiles a lot. I knew the minute I saw him he was a victim. The first time he came into this room I folded my arms over my head and ducked between my knees. It was like a hole had opened in the floor. After that, if he would say something I would look away like I hadn’t heard. I stayed close to the wall, on my side of the room. I spent months not communicating with him. And one day, not so long ago, they beat him up in the bathroom; they always get him there, but maybe this time was worse. I was under the last shower and still covered in soap. He was lying on the tiled floor wheezing, his teeth broken in pieces, the pink halo around his head sliding toward the drainpipe. I tried to look ahead and get the soap off my legs but I couldn’t stop staring at him. And he said, “I wonder what they wanted.” Then he tried to laugh but started to choke and had to stop. But he made it clear, he wasn’t going to hold it against me. He didn’t expect me to help.

  Now we talk about cars, or about television. Or bands, not that there’s ever any music in here. But mostly cars. We both like big cars a lot. I tell him my father drove a 1970 Cougar convertible with a white leather interior, the original hubcaps, and a 351 Quickstart engine. And everything is fine, except when Petey asks me personal questions like about Tuesday nights. “Don’t ask about that,” I tell him. But not too long ago I wouldn’t have answered him at all.

  I crawl under the sheet and the blue knit blanket. I always try to keep the sheet between my body and the blanket. They don’t wash the blankets. We sleep in our underwear, our clothes in the hallway next to our shoes. I close my eyes and think of nice things to dream about. I think about driving in my father’s convertible, sitting on his lap while he shows me how to drive around the lot at Warren State Park, the basketball courts in front of us, and the hill where I would sled in the winter. I try not to think about the burned-out shell of the car sitting in the alley, cinder and twisted carriage, waiting for my father’s friend with the truck to come and tow it away.

  “People and Folk,” Marco whispers to me and Petey at breakfast. The breakfast hall is rows of brown tables, one after another, thirty tables in two columns. Three long Plexiglas windows with steel wire running through them. Open seating divides itself by basic distinctions, People or Folk, the two largest Chicago gangs, and within those, subgroups: Deuces, Black Gangster Disciples, Assyrian Eagles, Vice Lords, Gay Lords, Latin Kings, Simon City Royals. Five points and six points, pitchforks and crowns. A separate table for the unaffiliated Knights of Kaba, a Muslim gang from Hyde Park. And within those groups color lines, ethnicities, neighborhoods, age. Central Park and Wilson, Farwell and Clark, Sixty-third and Cottage Grove. The intersections of Chicago meet here in the boys’ Juvenile Hall, the tables named after street corners. Toward the back of the room the boys get thinner and smaller and younger. Finally, outcasts, victims, fodder. Where we sit. There are two tables of us, the ugliest and the weakest, and we don’t even like each other.

  Petey smiles and shakes his head, which I take to mean he doesn’t understand. Petey doesn’t understand anything. He’s just big and dumb and ugly. But I understand what Marco is saying. Marco has short blond stubble and nods rapidly as he eats. Things are coming to a head. There’s a new inmate somewhere and it’s someone from the upper ranks. The soldiers are going to be expected to perform. It’s going to go off, and that’s why there’s the tension and the quiet. The two largest organizations. The worst possible news. Marco forces his entire strip of bacon into his mouth. I take a spoonful of oatmeal. Marco squints his mean eyes and looks at me as he chews.

  Ms. Jolet has wide hips and long black hair. She runs basic math problems on the board and I copy them into my book. I like her, even when she’s turned away, with chalk in her hand. She’s always upbeat. “You have to start each day happy,” she says. She wears bright lipstick, and her ears are full of jewelry. People are always trying to get her attention and she has a way of sharing it, which I hate. I watch her move and how the fabric of her dress hangs on her waist and then outlines her legs, where she is most fat, and fantasize about what she would do to me if she could keep me after school. Come here, Theo. Closer. I dream about being only six inches tall and Ms. Jolet taping me to the inside of her thighs, her giant legs crossing back and forth over me, and walking out of the building with me inside her skirt. Behind me the boys pass notes back and forth. Something hits the back of my head. I grab the wet paper with two fingers and let it drop to the floor. This is the good class, for kids that don’t get in trouble, kids who don’t need as much supervision. I copy the multiplication tables. I understand them now. I’m learning. I think I’m on track for my age, but I’d have to see the other tracks to know. Before noon I raise my hand and ask if I can use the bathroom. Ms. Jolet says yes.

  The halls are marked with red dashes that run five feet off the wall. The floor is the color of bone. When we’re in line we have to walk along the dashes, only turning when one group of dashes meets another group of dashes. When walking alone we have to stay between the dashes and the wall. I wear a necklace with a plastic hall pass. Because of my status I can go to the bathroom unescorted. I pass a boy walking in handcuffs flanked by two guards. They’re talking about something that has nothing to do with the boy between them and one of the guards takes a long slow look at me as we pass.

  I wash my hands before moving to the urinals. As I’m peeing Larry walks into the bathroom and steps to the urinal next to me. Larry is a Vice Lord, one of the heads, slated to join the El Rukns when he turns eighteen. He sits at the front table in the mess hall. Larry looks like he’s made out of bowling balls but he’s not much older than me. Maybe a year. His mouth is a thin line, like the cartoon Iron Man. “You’re not very big there,” Larry says looking down at my penis. I feel my cheeks go red and my breathing get heavy. My peeing slows down. “What’s wrong?” Larry asks. “I make you scared?”

  “No,” I answer. When I first came into Western I had sat at the wrong table and Larry reached across the table and pulled my face into his plate of mashed potatoes and meatloaf. Larry held me there, my hands gripping the ends of the table but I couldn’t pull away because it felt like I’d rip my hair out if I tried to move. “What are you doing at this table?” Larry asked, lifting my head up and ramming me down into the plate a few times, smearing the potatoes on my cheeks, the other boys laughing, their p
lates shivering on the wood, the guards ignoring the obvious. Finally he let go and I stood up, my legs weak, my face a mess of food and gravy. I slowly carried my plate to the back of the room and sat down, wiped the food from my face with a napkin, then stared straight ahead to the wall until the period was over. That was a year ago.

  Larry beat me up a lot when I first came here. He came up to me on the school yard and hit me with both his fists, in my back and my front, my wind leaving me. “Look,” he said to his friends. “He doesn’t even fight back.” Then one day Mr. Gracie asked me where I got the black eye from. I was seated naked on the desk in front of him and he held my chin in his hand. It was cold. I shook my head and Mr. Gracie let go of me then smacked me across the face and I said “No.” I kept my arms at my sides. But then Mr. Gracie hit me again and I said it was Larry and Larry never touched me after that.

  “You know what’s going to happen tonight?” Larry asks, pulling his pants up, rolling them over his penis deliberately. “Gonna be a big fight. Whose side you on?”

  “I’m not on anybody’s side,” I tell him and move with an affected calm to the sink and run the water, turning over my hands. I have long, thin scars on my left arm from my elbow to my wrist. Each time I look they seem more faded and farther away.

  “In all that commotion I could probably stab you. Nobody would notice. That’s messed up, right?”

  I dry my hands on the towel, turn to walk out of the bathroom. Larry is there, in front of me, blocking the way. I try to go around him and he moves with me, so that I would have to bump him if I’m going to get by.

  “Where you going?”

  “Back to class.”

  “Back to class,” Larry mimics. I feel my stomach snap closed and a wave of nausea pass through me. “That’s messed up, right? That I might stab you.” I look at my shoes, the yellow laces running through my sneakers. Larry hits me beneath my chin and my teeth clatter together. “You afraid of me?” I shake my head. “Why you looking away then? Something in your eye?” I look straight ahead into his face. Larry smiles at me. “I’m only playing with you. You know that. You gonna tell your bodyguard?”