Happy Baby (16 page)

“No,” Maria replies. “You’ll be out soon.”

You never know who’s going to be in control of you once you’re in a locked facility. And you never know what those people are going to do. When people are in control they’re capable of anything. Adults are always waiting to attack and you have to do everything possible not to disturb them. They’ll take you with their hand across your face. The car will be here any minute. It won’t be so long. I kiss the top of Maria’s head, the pale spot where her hair parts. Her hair is dry and sour smelling. I kiss her again. I will have years to keep her safe.

THERE ARE TWO yellow chairs, a green metal desk, and a round white clock on the wall. Above the desk on a shelf are the staff logs, a row of diaries they keep on our daily activities. We’re not allowed to read them. Yolanda’s waiting for my answer. What was the question?

“How’s school?”

“Same as last week.”

We’re in the staff office, a sheet of Plexiglas between us and the living room. Dante sleeps in the big chair, his fingers brushing the floor. Yolanda introduced him two weeks ago during dinner with her hand on the back of his collar. Something about, Let’s make him feel at home. He’s only thirteen, the youngest kid in Stevenson House. I’ll be sixteen soon and will have a cake and a gift of my choice. Yolanda’s only three years older than my roommate, Cateyes, who’s eighteen and walking around the living room now on his hands.

“I have your report card,” Yolanda says, though she isn’t holding anything. Her hands are folded into her lap, she’s wearing new nail polish, and she’s staring at me and smiling. “I’m wondering how we can do better.” She’s wearing white tights. Her feet are crossed at the ankles. I can see little black hairs on her legs through the tights. She’s too pretty to be staff here. “Theo?”

“I could go to class more.”

“Yes…”

All of the group home kids are wards of the court and we go to Kenmore, two miles east, close to the University of Chicago and away from the housing projects. There’s a special school inside Kenmore, a school within a school, on the third floor, for kids with behavioral disorders, an automatic classification for us.

Cateyes doesn’t have to go to school. He’s a dropout. His feet are in the air, his shirt down around his chest, bunched at his chin, showing off the brand on his stomach, VL for Vice Lords. He says the El Rukns gave it to him when he took his orders. The scar is the color of a penny and sits a quarter inch over his muscles and the dark trail of short curly hair to his belt.

“You’re not living up to your potential,” Yolanda says.

Anybody in Stevenson who has perfect school attendance for a week gets four dollars. They pay us to go to school because there’s only one staff in the morning and staff doesn’t come to the second floor. So nobody wakes us up. Nobody makes us do anything. Second staff comes from ten in the morning to ten at night.

“I don’t have any potential.”

“Who told you that?”

She uncrosses and recrosses her legs, her skirt riding over her knee. Everybody meets with Yolanda once a week for one-on-one. And for an hour she pretends to care. Then she does it again with someone else.

“What I’m asking,” she says, pulling her skirt down, “is how I could help.”

“You could drive me to school in the morning.” It’s a joke but she seems to consider it. There’s a loud bang. Cateyes is punching the Plexiglas.

“Watch this,” he says loudly at the pane so we can hear him. Cateyes is the oldest resident in Stevenson House and he also wears glasses, much thicker than Yolanda’s. Cateyes has a midnight curfew. For everybody else curfew is nine o’clock, except on bowling night. Cateyes throws his arms up, takes two steps from the window, and jumps, flipping over backward, landing on his feet. Yolanda claps her hands in appreciation.

“He’s just trying to get your attention,” I say.

“There’s nothing wrong with that.”

I shrug my shoulders and get up to leave. Our time is done for the week. Cateyes stops me on the way to the back door.

“What did she say about me?” he asks.

“She said you’re a good acrobat.”

“Damn right I am.” I reach for the knob. “You better not be lying,” he says.

“I’m not.”

Kevin, Nettles, John, and Hunter are playing basketball behind the house. There’s worse places than Stevenson House. Here, we come and go whenever we want and we have the only basketball court in the neighborhood. The hoop’s even got a net.

Toby stands on the porch with a cigarette and offers it to me but I shake my head. Toby never plays, he just watches, his baseball cap pulled tight over his red curls. “Coming tonight?” he asks.

“Unless I get invited to some big party.”

“You know something I don’t?” He smokes his cigarette like it’s a cigar, like he’s celebrating, and I nod so he knows I’m joking and that I’ll meet him in his room when everyone is asleep.

The court is surrounded by a fifteen-foot fence and beyond the fence a field filled with cinder blocks and patches of grass and then the first project building followed by rows of projects, to the horizon. The buildings are so tall that it’s light outside hours after the sun sets behind them. Kevin has the ball and smiles like a lion. He’s staff like Yolanda but he’s been around longer. He only wears silk shirts and never takes his shirt off because he’s a Muslim. Kevin is a gang leader for the Knights of Kaba. When he works nights he deals drugs out of the home.

“Larry Bird,” he says, pointing to me. Nettles takes a frantic swipe at the ball and Kevin tosses it over Nettles’s forearm, then catches it as if it were on a string. One time Kevin played against all eight of us and said he would buy us ice cream if we won. But we didn’t because no one was willing to pass the ball. They’re playing three on one, but Hunter and John seem stuck behind Nettles. Kevin rolls the ball around Nettles’s waist. Nettles backs up, bumping Hunter. “Now,” Kevin says. His feet shift and cross, the ball disappearing then reappearing again. Nettles jumps and lands just as Kevin leans back, his hands fading behind his head, his eyes closed. The ball catches softly in the net. Kevin looks around like he doesn’t know where he is. “Ooooh. I’m good. Oooh oooh ooooh.” He walks on his toes with his hands bunched in front of him. “Ha ha. You ever seen anything like that, Theo?”

“No,” I say from the porch, taking a drag from Toby’s cigarette and handing it back to him. “I’ve never seen anyone walk like a hamster.”

“Again,” Nettles says. He’s holding his hat in his left hand and running his right over his scalp.

“That’s all right,” John says, pulling up his pants. “We’ll do it one net at a time.”

“Don’t ask me for shit,” Hunter says. Hunter’s big like John, but thick and solid. Hunter’s dangerous because he’s stupid and he’s only your friend when he wants something. One time I went with Hunter to his home on the west side. Grown men recognized Hunter and moved out of his way. It was the afternoon and his mother greeted us in a transparent peach nightgown holding a glass full of ice. “Hello boys,” she said. When she recognized us her expression changed and she told us to make some sandwiches.

“Go get your boys, big man,” Kevin says, pretending to throw the ball at Hunter’s head. Hunter puts his hands in front of his face. “Get ’em as big as they come so I can knock ‘em down like bowling pins. Get in the game, Theo.” He’s holding the ball upside down in his palm. “Shoot it up, lightbulb.” He bounces the ball to me at the free throw line. “North side, make it take it. First bucket for two.”

“Lightbulb,” Hunter laughs. “That’s messed up.”

“You do have a big head,” John says to me.

“I’m going to pass you like the wind, fatso,” I say. I turn the basketball over. I feel good. I’m going to have a good game. I hear the back door close as Toby goes back in the house.

“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” John says.

“Shoot the ball already,” Nettles says. “C’mon.”

At night Cateyes leaves the radio playing beneath his pillow. His light snoring filters along the edges of the music, endless background noise, fast muffled house beats with repetitive lyrics:
it’s not over, no it’s not over, it’s not over
. Occasionally I can hear a gunshot from the projects, or the fence rattling in the backyard. Sometimes I hear sirens, but usually the sirens are part of the song. If I reach below the pillow to turn the radio off Cateyes will wake up and I’ll have to fight him.

Cateyes’s small mustache catches bits of moonlight. He smiles when he sleeps and he never moves. I creep past his bed and out to the hall just as Dante is stepping from the bathroom. We stare at each other, then Dante disappears into his room.

I lock Toby’s door behind me. Toby sits on his bed with his back to the window. He’s not wearing socks or a shirt, and his torso is pale, freckled, and hairless. Ladders of scars rising from his shoulders to his elbows. He puts his thumbs up and I nod and give him two thumbs up.

“Hell yeah,” he says, swinging his fists through the air.

“Keep it low,” I say. “Dante’s lurking.”

Toby’s last roommate got sent to Saint Charles, long-term, so Toby has a room to himself for a little while. The empty bed is stripped, the naked mattress faded with brown and red stains. Toby’s room seems sparse and spacious with just him living in it, even though it just barely fits the two beds and dressers. He has an AC/DC poster and a
Friday the 13th
poster on the inside of the door, the killer in a hockey mask stalking forward. I sit down next to Toby; he bends his knees toward me. I pull the crumpled cellophane from my pocket while Toby lights a cigarette, takes a drag, and puts it in my mouth. “This rules,” Toby says.

“Welcome to the windowpane.” The windowpane is a red plastic tab with a silver lightning bolt jiggered unevenly across it.

“How do we do this?” Toby asks. I move away from him and grip the outside of the tab with my thumb and index finger and place it on the dresser. Toby stands, leaning against me, breathing on my neck.

“It’s supposed to be the same as four hits. Got any scissors?”

“I have a knife.” Toby digs his hand under his mattress and pulls out a large pocketknife with a wooden handle and a scrap of metal screwed into its end.

“Fuck,” I say. “Who are you going to kill with this thing?”

“Your roommate,” he says.

I pull the blade from the handle and it locks into place.

I split the tab in half, digging the knife into the top of the dresser and leaving a big scratch that no one will ever notice. We each place a half under our tongue. I carve the anarchy A with a circle around it into the dresser.

“Once you kill someone you can never go back,” I say, brushing the blade over my wrist and sucking on my cigarette as my skin breaks and a small drop of blood spills onto the floor.

“Cut yourself?” Toby asks.

“Just a little.”

We smoke our cigarettes and wait. Then we light a couple more. Toby got a whole carton from somewhere. I stand against the dresser, then place my chin on top of the dresser in front of the knife and look into the grey piles of ash. Toby relaxes into his bed.

“Lay down,” he says. “It feels good.”

“I don’t feel anything yet.” The cigarette smoke is purple.

One night we took acid in Toby’s room and couldn’t figure out how to get the door back open. I climbed out his window and across the fire escape as if it were a monkey bar and swung through the window into my bedroom next door. Maybe I’ll do that again. I like the way the stairs feel beneath my feet. You can use them for balance but if you try to put any weight on them they fall away from you. If I slipped I would have died but I felt like a superhero that night, two stories above the city, climbing in the air, the wind spearing through the towers, my feet against something unsteady. I could see the orange stripe of the hospital buried like a treasure inside the projects.

“There’s a lot of people I want to kill,” he says.

“Have you ever killed anyone?” I ask. I push the smoke from my mouth slowly so that it covers my face. I think of melting rain and buildings humming like speakers. I want to laugh. Everything is so damn funny. I think of a city blanketed in fog, a horn sounding through the alleyways and long-nosed detectives in trench coats searching for clues. My father used to quote Humphrey Bogart. My father was killed with a shotgun at close range. My mother died shortly after that. She had multiple sclerosis and one day I came home late from school and her chin was on her chest, and I knew her head had fallen forward and she had been unable to breathe. I press my teeth together and my ears start to ring. It dawns on me that Toby probably has killed someone. Definitely Cateyes has, and Hunter. Hunter is big and dangerous. He once beat Cateyes to within an inch of his life and when Cateyes was lying unconscious Hunter kicked him in the back of his head. And Kevin, Kevin, Kevin, I’m sure Kevin’s killed someone. I don’t understand why Kevin even works here. I think Kevin is like Jesus. He’s trying to teach us something. He said once he’d been at a college in California for a year on a basketball scholarship but had to return to the state. One time he asked me if I was high and I admitted I was and he gave me a piece of chicken that had been fried with honey inside of it. I’ve never tasted anything like it. He always has rolls of money in his pocket. When I asked him why he works here he just said that it was a good job for a thug.

Toby thinks about it for a second, like he’s considering lying. Then he says no, he’s never killed anyone. I wave my cigarette like a wand because I’m not sure if he chose to lie or not. I write my name in the air and try to inhale some of the smoke.

“You’re my only friend,” Toby says, staring into the ceiling, desperately squeezing his legs together and rubbing his hands over his pockets. “I cut myself with that knife before, a bunch of times. We’re blood brothers. We need to back each other up.”

“We need to not make any waves. I’m not your Tonto or Lone Ranger. I couldn’t back you up if I tried.”

“Let’s go get my stepdad.” He always wants to go find his stepfather on the north side. He blames his stepfather for his mother kicking him out of the house. After she kicked him out he burned down the Wheels Warehouse on Devon and they caught him and put him in the mental hospital. Then they discharged him here. People used to call him Crazy Toby, but it didn’t really fit and people stopped calling him that.