Happy Baby

by Stephen Elliott

  “Don’t let your ass get your mouth in trouble,” Taro says. He’s been saying that for six months. He looks at me and jerks his thumb toward Edward, rolling his eyes like Edward is crazy. Suddenly Taro turns, screaming, his tongue out of his mouth, his eyes crossed. “Wazzow!” Taro yells. Edward jumps. Taro tags him. “You’re it. Ha ha, fatso.”

  Edward takes the ball and throws it to his brother. Then he tramps under the basketball net, opens the gate to his yard, and walks inside his house without looking back. “Where are you going?” Taro asks. “I thought we were friends forever.” He’s answered by the sound of the back door, which sounds like a can dropping.

  Sammy looks at the ball in his hand, then Taro, then me. I shrug my shoulders. Sammy runs into the house after Edward.

  “Now what do you want to do?” Taro asks, leaning against the garbage can. He hands me his cigarette and I take a drag, then hand it back to him. He doesn’t know that I’ve been practicing. I bought a pack of cigarettes from the Marlboro machine at Poppin’ Fresh and I’ve been sneaking out at night and smoking them down the block. Smoking makes me dizzy, but I’m getting better at it. At first I didn’t inhale.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t care. Just hang out.”

  “I can’t wait until I’m older,” Taro says. “Then I can have a car and a gun. I’m going to join the army and kill gooks.” I shake my head. On the television all week, the helicopters have been taking the last Americans out of Vietnam. Taro is Chinese.

  “What if someone shoots you by mistake?” I ask.

  “Watch it,” he says. “You’re on dangerous ground.”

  My dad says that the Vietnamese cheated us. He says they shot down our pilots and tortured them. He also says that anybody that goes to fight in Vietnam is a sucker. My father believes it’s important to look out for yourself first, then your family. He told me his solution was to put all of the Vietnamese that were friendly to us on a boat. Then carpet-bomb the whole country till it was just a big parking lot. Then sink the boat. We were on the couch and he had his arm over my shoulder. I thought he was serious until he started to laugh. “You’re not a very nice man,” my mother said. She wasn’t as sick back then. My father poked me in the ribs. “I’m not a very nice man,” he said.

  “We should sniff spraypaint,” Taro says. “You spray it in a bag, then you put the bag over your face.”

  “Sounds messy.”

  “It gets you high by killing brain cells.”

  “Feel that?”

  “Feel what?”

  “It’s raining.”

  “It’s not raining,” Taro says. “Let’s kidnap someone’s kitten and hold it for ransom. How much should we ask for it?” When I don’t answer he says, “Of course, we’d need a getaway vehicle.”

  “How about a fire truck?”

  “I was thinking a go-kart,” he says.

  “I wonder if I should get home,” I say. But it’s still early. It won’t be night for hours. I don’t want to go home yet.

  We head through the alleys to the schoolyard and hang out by the swings; the ground is rubber, made out of recycled gym shoes. “What do you think of Mrs. Smith?” Taro asks me.

  “I wouldn’t mind staying after school,” I say. Everybody is in love with our teacher. My father even comes in for parent-teacher meetings. He tells me to tell Mrs. Smith he would like to take her for dinner sometime. He calls her a biscuit.

  “She is fucking hot,” Taro says. “I’m gonna fuck her.”

  “How are you going to do that? She’s married.”

  “Marriage doesn’t mean anything,” Taro says, picking a scab at his ankle. “People just get married for tax reasons.” I think about my mother and wonder if my father married her for tax reasons. It seems unlikely. “Guess what,” he says. “My mother married my dad so she wouldn’t get kicked out of the country.”

  “Really?” I say.

  “Yeah. But don’t tell anyone.”

  “Who would I tell?”

  “Just don’t, jackass.”

  We watch the older kids play basketball. Elvis, who’s an American Indian, not an Indian Indian like the Indians on Devon, hits a shot from the three-point line and raises the back of his hands against his temples so it looks like he has wings on his head. If they need extra players they’ll sometimes invite us to play with them. But they don’t seem to want players today, even though the teams are uneven. Elvis is cool. One time we played with them and won and Elvis bought us a popsicle from the ice cream truck. Elvis looks over at us and raises the peace sign. We make the peace sign back to him. The two black kids, who live on the other side of Warren Park, are on Elvis’s team, and they’re beating the four white kids.

  “I am totally gonna fuck Mrs. Smith,” Taro says. I think of Mrs. Smith sitting at her desk in a dark blue shirt and the heels she wears.

  “If you get someone pregnant before you’re eighteen and they have a boy, would it be your brother or your son?” I ask.

  “Your son, stupid.”

  “I know. I’m just kidding. What if you got your mom pregnant?”

  “What are you, a hillbilly?”

  “Well?”

  “I don’t even know why I hang out with you.” Taro takes his cigarette pack out. “Last one.” He lights his cigarette and smokes it for a while. I keep looking over at the other kids and wondering if we can get in the game. Elvis keeps hitting these crazy shots. It’s like he can fly.

  “Look at that,” I say.

  “My mom wants you to come over for dinner again.” Taro hands me the smoke. His parents own a restaurant and they live in two rooms behind the restaurant. Nobody ever comes over to my house. Everybody in the neighborhood is afraid of my dad.

  “For why?”

  Taro shrugs. It’s really starting to rain. “Seriously, though,” Taro says. “I’m going to marry Mrs. Smith. And I want you to be my best man.”

  I think about it for a second. “I want to get married too. You can be my best man too,” I say.

  The building I live in is six stories high, the largest building on the block. It’s grey and there’s a small backyard but people throw trash back there and the high yellow weeds poke through the milk cartons and plastic bags. We live on the third floor. My father is the building manager, which means he collects the rents from everybody and sometimes evicts people. When he evicts people he wears his puffy black jacket with the policeman’s patch on the shoulder. But my father is not a policeman. The building owner is short and Greek. His son, Aris, is in my grade and is good at bombardment. The owner comes over and my dad and him hang out in front of the building, leaning against my father’s car, which is a blue Cougar convertible with a white leather interior. My dad is really proud of his car. He likes to stand in front of his car in the summer in just a pair of shorts and a undershirt he calls his wife-beater.

  “You’ve been smoking,” my mother says. She’s lying on the couch, covered in her brown blanket with the tiger patterns on it. It’s hard for her to talk so I don’t answer. Next to her is a white bucket on the floor that she uses to go to the bathroom. It takes her a long time so she’s careful not to drink too much water. There’s a box of diapers waiting for her, but so far she has refused to wear them. Her head is shaking really hard from side to side. I’m worried her head will fall forward to her chest and she won’t be able to get it up. I pick up the bucket, which has pee in it and toilet paper, and I walk it to the bathroom and dump it in the toilet and flush the toilet. Then I rinse it out in the bathtub. There is nothing that smells worse than this bucket when it’s full of dark yellow pee. I let the warm water and soap rise in the bucket and press my forehead against the wall.

  A few months ago I was hanging in front of the main door with Taro and some of the other guys. Taro was singing theme songs and everybody had to guess the TV show. My father stopped in the street and everybody got quiet and I ran down the steps and got in the car and we drove away. “Your mother’s going to die soon,”
he said. He was wearing big-mirrored sunglasses so I saw myself instead of his eyes. It was a really sunny day out even though it was still cold. My dad drove with the top down. “I want you to be ready for it.”

  I kept my eyes on the dashboard, which is also white leather like the seats. My father stopped at a stop sign but didn’t move right away. He was waiting for me to say something. I couldn’t tell what the right answer was. I couldn’t say OK. I wanted to ask, How? How was I supposed to be ready? “The doctors say it doesn’t usually progress this fast. They don’t know anything. See if you can find a doctor who can change an alternator.” There was a car behind us, but they didn’t honk. My father turned around and looked at them for a long second anyway. He put the car in park, resting his hand on the door window. I thought he was going to get out of the car. My dad’s not afraid of anybody. Then he put the car back in gear and continued to drive.

  My mother hasn’t died yet, but she has gotten worse. She shakes all the time, even when she’s sleeping. Sometimes I have to hold under her arms for her to pee. And she takes a lot of pills, which aren’t supposed to make her better, just help her with the discomfort. My father says she got multiple sclerosis because where she’s from there’s a river named Ouse and a lot of people who lived along that river got multi ple sclerosis. I go through the pictures my father keeps of her on the bookshelf. A picture taken at the McDonald’s near Touhy shows my mother at the front of the line accepting a tray with a small hamburger and fries on it. She looks like someone just told her a joke. It must have been winter because she was wearing a fur hat that covered her ears. My mother, before, was incredibly beautiful. Everybody says so. She was always thin, but in the pictures she is very healthy looking. She never wore much makeup and her skin is clear except for a burst red blood vessel just below her eye. My father says she’s descended from nobility, but my mother told me that wasn’t true. Her father was a mailman. My father met her in England, in a small town near Sheffield. The story is that he was wearing a leather jacket at the time, and my mother had never met an American before. When he got back to the States he started writing her letters. Then he sent her a one-way ticket.

  “I should never have married him,” she said to me once after he had been screaming and the dining room table was broken into pieces, wood everywhere, half a table leg next to the couch. The curtains were torn down and there was broken glass on the floor. But she was already paralyzed by then. “I’m going to go into remission,” she said. “Then I’m going to go home. You’ll see.”

  I put the bucket back next to my mother. The streetlights have come on outside. I sit at the end of the couch with her and watch The Price Is Right with Bob Barker. He wants to know how much a trip to Bermuda is worth. Then he wants to know how much it costs for a box of Tide. Then he asks people to bid on Bermuda, the Tide, and an oil painting of some man sitting by the side of a pool. “The oil painting isn’t worth anything. Two thousand dollars,” I say. Bob Barker pulls a card out of an envelope. “Six thousand six hundred and eighty-three dollars,” he says, and a woman in a thick white sweater jumps up and down, her hands clasped in front of her ample chest. The models in bathing suits are smiling and showing their wrists. “I guess that painting is worth more than I thought it was.” I feel my mother’s toes against my leg. I know I should stay home more. If something happens and I’m not here it’s going to be my fault. I slide closer to her and her feet roll over my legs. I pull the blanket back and take her feet in my hands. I rub them back and forth as fast as I can, like I’m trying to start a fire. She likes it when I do this.

  “Theo,” she says, in that quavering way she has. But she doesn’t want anything. She’s just saying my name.

  There are three bedrooms in our apartment. My bedroom is a small room just off the kitchen. There used to be wood paneling on the walls but my father covered it with wallpaper that looks like the sky, blue, with white clouds and birds. I love the wallpaper. It makes me feel like I’m outside, even when I’m sleeping.

  My bed is next to the window and the rain is coming steadily now, hitting the glass like drumbeats. If I leave the shade up I can see the porch steps and the alley. If I lean my face into the glass I can see the basketball rim on Sammy and Edward’s garage and the yard to the building across the way where the Germans keep a Great Dane. That’s a big mean dog. I see a small orange glow down there. I wonder who’s smoking in the alley in the rain. I have my history book in bed. Tomorrow we have a test on Andrew Jackson.

  The back door opens. Then my father’s heavy boots on the kitchen floor. I listen to hear if he is sighing. When my father is in a bad mood he sighs loudly. One time he was sighing so loudly that I opened my window and climbed three stories down the gutter to the street and didn’t come back until the next day. The sound of the boots gets louder across the kitchen and then there is a knock on my door.

  “Yes?” I say, as if it could be anybody.

  “Come on out.”

  I slip out of my bed and pull on a pair of socks. My father sits at the kitchen table with the overhead light on. The light swings like the chain was yanked too hard. I look quickly to the sink to be sure that I’ve washed all the dishes already. There’s a plate there, smeared with tomato sauce. There’s a brown paper bag on the table. It reminds me of the bag full of money my father once invited me to look at.

  He’s seated with one arm on the table, another on his leg. He hasn’t been shaving recently and his face is covered with thick grey stubble. My father has a thick face, with large cheeks hanging over his jaw like pouches. He’s mostly bald with the rest of his hair cut short. He always has dark circles under his eyes but he never seems tired. He’s wearing his brown leather jacket. I wonder if it’s the same jacket he met my mother in. My mother is sleeping on the couch now. I used to wheel her into her bedroom. But now she says not to bother. She hasn’t been off the couch in close to a week.

  “Get two bowls and two spoons,” my father says. I climb on the counter and grab two bowls and two spoons from the cabinet. Next to the bowls are ten cans of unopened Chef Boyardee. My father takes a small gun out of his pocket and places it on the table behind the bag. I sit down across from him. He reaches into the bag and pulls out a pint of vanilla ice cream. He balls up the bag and throws it toward the garbage but misses and the bag rolls near the refrigerator. “Pick that up later, OK?”

  “OK.”

  He digs a spoon into the carton and dumps a big scoop of ice cream into a bowl and pushes the bowl toward me. Then he takes some for himself.

  “How was your day? You taking care of yourself?”

  “It was OK. I played with Edward and Sammy and then I hung out with Taro for a while.”

  “Oh yeah, Taro. The chink. Tell him your old man says hi.”

  “I will.”

  We eat the ice cream together quietly, my father drumming his large fingers on the table and the refrigerator buzzing. I can see the moon in the hatch window above the sink. The kitchen is very yellow. The floor and the refrigerator are both yellow. There’s the door to the back porch, which is blue. But the white walls only reflect the floor and the refrigerator.

  When the ice cream is almost done my father and I tip the bowls to our mouths and drink all of the stuff that has melted and place our bowls back down on the table together. He takes my bowl from me and places it inside his bowl and then the two spoons inside the top bowl together. He turns the gun on the table so it is pointing at me then places his hand over the gun, completely covering it. Then he puts the gun back in his pocket. He looks me up and down and bites on the inside of his mouth.

  “How’s everything at school?”

  “It’s good. We all wrote a report on black leaders. Then we put it together in a black leader book. I wrote about Jesse Jackson.”

  My father nods and smiles. “I could tell you a couple of things about your pal Jesse Jackson.” He leans forward and rubs my head. Then leans back and looks at me. I lean back too; we both place an elbow o
n the table. “So everything’s good? Nobody’s giving you a hard time?”

  “Nobody gives me a hard time.”

  “What a night for it to start raining. They’re teaching Jesse Jackson in schools now. Times sure have changed. You need some money or something? Here, take ten dollars.” My father pulls out a large wad of bills from his pocket. He likes to have a lot of cash on him. If he gets arrested he wants to be able to make bail. He peels through the bills, like he’s considering giving me more, and then pulls a ten-dollar bill off the bottom of the stack, hands it to me. He puts the roll of money back in his pocket. “Everything’s good?” he asks me again. He looks a little suspicious this time. I wonder if he’s going to ask for the ten dollars back.

  “Yeah,” I tell him. I fold the ten-dollar bill in half and put it in my pocket. My father’s eyes widen and close. He raises his hand and I flinch. He squeezes the skin on his forehead and I think he’s going to cry.

  Somewhere on my block a car’s motor is still running. He’s going back outside again. He reaches across the table and rubs his hands beneath my nose, squeezing whatever he got into a fist, then wipes his hand on his jeans.

  “You’re a handsome guy,” he says. “Anybody ever tell you that?”

  I don’t answer but I feel the heat in my face. He pushes against the table, his chair leg scraping the floor. He stands, patting his pockets, making sure he has everything. I stand with him, gathering the dishes.

  “Alright,” he says, latching a ring full of keys to a clip on his belt. “You’re Daddy’s boy. Don’t worry about anything else.”

  His arms encircle me, pulling me into him, surrounding me with the hard dark creases of his jacket and his smell, which is thick, like metal and oil. He stands still. I’m with him, holding the empty bowls. When a horn punctures the quiet apartment, my father’s fingers grip my ribs. He hasn’t left yet. He’s still here.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to first thank Tamara Guirado for encouraging me to write about sex; as ridiculous as that sounds, it’s true. I owe a tremendous debt to the Truman Capote Foundation for funding the fellowship at Stanford that allowed me to write this book.