Authors: Stephen Elliott
I look older than everyone here because I’ve grown a beard. Everybody pitched in and I bought bottles of Night Train and Mad Dog 20/20 at the liquor store near the metro. It’s nearly dawn. We’re shooting dice in Nettles’ room. Dante is asleep in his bed. We’re betting everything we have.
“Hold still,” Cateyes says to me. I’m on the stool and he’s giving me my first tattoo, a dagger on my left shoulder blade. He sterilized the pin by holding it over a lighter. He dips the pin into a bottle of India ink, one dot at a time.
Waukee lays fifty cents on the line and Nettles matches it, separating the two stacks with a pencil. Toby gives everyone cigarettes, even me, though we haven’t spoken since he got beat up. “Bet,” Nettles says. Waukee rolls a six.
The tattoo hurts but soon turns from pricks to a dull throbbing. Cateyes works slowly and carefully, pulling down on my skin with his other hand as if he were an artist. But he isn’t, and his eyesight is bad. The tattoo is taking a bad shape. People keep handing me bottles, saying it will help with the pain. The girls came over yesterday. There was a new Hispanic girl, Maria, just admitted. She wore only pink, even pink earrings. Toby tried to talk to her but she wouldn’t answer him. He offered her his watch but she shook her head. Cateyes sat on the front steps with Shoshanna. The rest of the girls stood near the fence smoking and we played basketball for them.“I’m in,” Toby says, throwing a quarter on the floor.
“Too late, duck face,” Waukee says.
Hunter says something unintelligible and laughs to himself. He’s holding a bottle against his large belly, and a long strand of snot is hanging from his nose. Everybody is ashing on the floor.
“How do you like that?” Cateyes asks. The dagger is off the hilt, and there’s stray dots everywhere like blue freckles across my arm. He keeps pushing a towel against my arm and pulling it away. The pinholes are weeping blue ink and blood. It’s a large tattoo; it covers my whole shoulder blade.
“It’s great,” I say. I feel dizzy.
“You ain’t gonna believe it in the morning,” Cateyes says.
“Is this just a dream?” I ask, joking.
“Shit,” Waukee says. “Drink this and you’ll fall over.” He seems to be stumbling himself. The Mad Dog tastes like Orange Crush.
“I want to bet,” I say.
“What do you got?” Nettles asks.
“I’ve got a necklace,” I say. My mother’s cheap chain with a phony silver dollar on it. They kept it for three years in a yellow pouch then handed it to me when they let me out. I’m ready to lose it.
“What do you want for it?”
“I got a quarter on Theo,” John says.
“I’ll take that bet,” Toby says.
“I want your DCFS shirt,” I say. Nettles has a long purple T-shirt with the number ten on the back. On the front it says Department of Children and Family Services. He never wears it outside of the house because he doesn’t want people to know he’s in a group home. I want the whole world to know.
“Get your necklace,” Nettles says.
The necklace and shirt are next to each other on the carpet. My arm is throbbing and the room is starting to spin. “You should tattoo my face,” I say. I shake the dice in both hands and blow on them. I throw the dice into the wall and they roll near Hunter’s feet. If I lose this bet I’m wondering if I have anything else. I really want that shirt.
Six-four, a ten. “That’s a tough throw,” John says. “Unlucky. Pairs is different.” Suddenly Dante lets out an enormous snore, like truck brakes. Everybody laughs and John drops his cigarette and it rolls underneath the bed where Dante is sleeping. We watch the cigarette. Dante’s thin arm emerges from the blanket and scratches sleepily at the window. I throw the dice. They smack the wall and come up eight.
The cigarette is smoldering, darkening the carpet around its tip. Thick black smoke is rising from the bed frame. Dante lets out another snore, then a small sound like a cat crying. Nobody knows why he’s here. His mom wears nice clothes and makeup. I feel for a second like I’m going to throw up, and then my stomach settles. I roll the dice again. Snake-eyes.
“C’mon Theo,” John says. As if dice were a game of skill and I wasn’t trying hard enough.
“Hey now,” I say, turning the dice over in my palm, squeezing their edges. “I have big hands. I should have been taller.”
A small fire starts, like the wick of a candle. I think the fire is going to reach the mattress but nobody moves to do anything about it. We watch the flame jump. Will it go out?
“Dante,” I say. “Starring in
The Burning Bed
.”
“Oh shit,” John says, letting out a short breathy laugh. “That’s my boy.”
“Roll the dice, Theo,” Nettles says. “Keep hesitating we’re going to send you over to Price Home in a skirt.” I think he wants to lose the shirt. I think he’ll give it to me anyway because in another week he’ll be in rehab and none of us will ever see him again.
“What do you have to do to set off a smoke alarm in this place?”
“Watch Dante light up the screen,” John says. This time everybody laughs.
“Yeah, yeah. Absolutely,” I say, shaking my hands over my head. I can feel my heartbeat in the dull throbbing pain in my arm. The fire spreads beneath the bed, a short half-inch flame the length of a sheet of paper. The bed sheet catches for a second, then the lit piece drops like water and goes out but the fire on the floor keeps burning. “He’s famous. He’s big time.”
“His hottest role ever,” John says. “His career is on fire. A trailblazing young actor.” Hunter’s laughing and his face is covered in snot and sweat. He looks like he was just born. Toby shakes his head and tries to take a drink from the Night Train but can’t stop laughing and the wine pours from the sides of his mouth like blood. Dante turns over, rolling toward the wall, pulling his arms under his body, his butt appearing beneath the blanket.
“A star is born,” I say, and throw the dice up in the air. The dice bounce on the carpet, tumbling against the dresser. A six. The ink has dribbled to my elbow. One of us should put the fire out. If we were somewhere else we probably would. But we’re not somewhere else. This is where we live.
Nobody thought Yolanda would come back and she didn’t. I never saw my caseworker either after he dropped me off here. Staff come and go all the time. I can imagine the conversation Yolanda had with her boyfriend. They were naked in bed, her small breasts, large red nipples. Everything about her was perfect. She said, “
Those children are monsters. You can’t help them. We should put them in workfarms or in the desert
.” And her boyfriend curled toward her, to smell her hair and her neck and to feel between her legs where it was warm and wet. He was glad because he didn’t want to share her. “
They’re only children. You just had a bad experience. Children need second chances
.”
“Not these children,” she said. “There aren’t enough chances in all the world for these children.
” And maybe then they showered and had dinner and moved on to other topics. People that don’t know any better are always optimistic. I see it on the news.
“You want that shirt or not?” Nettles asks. “You got some hoochie you’re thinking about? You thinking about that Spanish girl that came in the van?” I pick the dice up as the flame is reaching the edge of the wall, blackening the corners.
“C’mon Theo, roll the dice.”
“I want that shirt,” I say, placing the dice on the floor in front of me, calculating the distance to the wall, lining them up, six-four, then taking them in my hand, careful to keep my head below the smoke.
“Win it then. Show us what you got.”
THE HOSPITAL IS a long white room with two iron doors. The floor is white hexagonal tiles and there’s steel webbing stretched so tightly over the windows it looks like it will snap. The hospital is attached to the juvenile detention center through a series of locked doors and elevators. They brought me here after Mr. Gracie stopped coming to work, leaving me unprotected, and Larry broke my leg. “Where’s your boyfriend now?” Larry asked, while two other boys held me between the sinks by my throat and elbows. Larry kicked at my knee until there was a pop and all three of them ran out. My leg healed but I’ve been kept on the hospital ward instead of the detention center. Staff didn’t want me to break my leg again. I stopped speaking for a month but nobody seemed to notice.
Time passes slowly without school classes or fights or games. Sometimes I play checkers with whoever’s in the bed next to mine. Sometimes we play gin rummy. The lights swing on green chains from ceiling beams inside broken plaster. The kid on the end is cuffed to his bed and talks loudly about how dangerous he is and during lunch people throw butter packets at him. The doctors and nurses are friendly but cautious. The television only gets one channel which is filled with fuzzy soap operas during the day and Iran and Iraq at night. And things are usually quiet, and safe. Today I’m getting out.
“Ready?” my caseworker asks. He’s the third caseworker I’ve had since I was eleven. There might have been a fourth who I never met. Adults come and go.
“Been ready,” I tell him and he snorts. Everybody else looks away or pretends to be asleep. Most kids are only here for a few days except for me and Ricky, who’s on dialysis. A doctor stands three beds down with a clipboard. I hold my arms out and my caseworker squeezes his handcuffs shut on my wrists, testing the chain with his index finger, pulling me forward as I stand up. I close my eyes and breathe for a second. It’s better to be handcuffed in here anyway because when you’re handcuffed it’s like you don’t have a face.
He leads me through the first set of doors, where the nurse is counting meds and stacking them next to a pile of Dixie cups and a plastic pitcher full of Kool-Aid. “Don’t forget to visit,” she says without looking up. Then a second door with a buzzer and a keylock. My caseworker leaves his key in the door and says, “Discharge, one custody,” twice into a speakerphone. We stop in the bucket room for my belongings—a pair of jeans and my mother’s necklace. The walls are grey steel boxes with numbers written over the front of them. The guard there and my caseworker exchange small talk. “Who you voting for?” “I’m voting for a forty hour week and a pay raise.” “Heard that.” We pass the secretary, a different secretary than the one that was here when I came in, down to the courtroom area where a line of parents and children are waiting to be searched by an officer at the end of a conveyer belt. We pass under a sign that says DCFS ID BADGE REQUIRED NO RE-ENTRY
Outside it’s hot and wet. It’s the middle of summer and the sky is white. My caseworker slips a hand under my armpit as we cross to a new three-story parking lot. I wonder what else has changed in the time I’ve been inside. A large black woman passes us with her hand around the back of a child’s neck and stares briefly at my handcuffs and clucks her tongue and smiles as if I’d done something cute.
We stop at a tan Toyota with rust around the wheel-wells. There’s a puddle of bright green liquid in front of the car. I lean against the mirror while he squats near the bumper and sticks his finger in the puddle. He looks disappointed and shakes his hand, wiping his finger on the hood.
“Japs ripped me off,” he says. “I just got this car. Used.” He turns the ignition and the car starts and I grab the seatbelt awkwardly with both hands and pull it across my lap. “Do you know anything about cars?” he asks.
“I’m only fourteen,” I tell him.
“I thought you were fifteen.”
“Next week.”
“Happy birthday then.” He opens the glove compartment, sees nothing in it, and slams it shut before throwing the car into gear. “Probably a pin leak. I’ll pour some glue in there. That stuff fixes everything.” He shows his ID to a man inside a glass box at the bottom of the ramp and the man waves him past. The red radiator light and the yellow engine light are lit on the dashboard. “There’s some bad news,” he says, guiding the car into traffic, stopping at a light behind a chicken truck.
The last time he came was the first time I met him. He sat on the edge of my bed and told me a Christian family was going to adopt me. He was hyper and spoke fast, checking his watch between sentences and shaking his leg. I thought he was on drugs. He said they were very Christian, had three daughters and a swimming pool. “You ever prayed before?” he asked. He said the foster family lived near Harlem Irving Plaza.
But we’re not going in that direction. I’m still wearing handcuffs and we’re heading south on Lake Shore Drive between the water and downtown. Grant Park is littered with tents, looks like a festival. He shakes a cigarette out of a pack in his breast pocket.
“The mother’s sick,” he says. “Real sick. When you’re sick the church absolves you from your Christian responsibilities.” He punches a button on the dashboard and warm air blows in from the vents. “That was a joke, lighten up. We couldn’t leave you in Western anymore. There was a court order.” He looks at me and takes his cigarette out of his mouth, makes a point in the air with it. The car is a mess and I pick up a ticket stub for
The Empire Strikes Back
, then drop it back to my feet. His lips are almost orange; his bangs are wet and stuck to his forehead. He looks like he’s dying. People are bicycling on the path next to the lake and the lake is filled with sailboats and somewhere in the distance a metal structure sits on the water. I was a year late getting out. I shouldn’t have still been there when Larry decided to break my leg.
“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.