Happy Baby (21 page)

“Line up against the wall, single file. Line up against the wall, single file. Line up against the wall, single file.”

We’re against the wall, our backs facing out, our legs spread, our hands pressing into the stone. Petey is on the other side of me, his head down. A smile grows across my face. Marco turns his head slightly and we look at each other and I think Marco is going to start laughing. His face is contorting, his eyes squeezing shut involuntarily, and tears are running over his cheek, pooling into his mouth. He’s mewing, his tongue licking at the puddles. Behind us, someone is dead. But it isn’t us. A doctor is examining a boy who is lying in the middle of the yard with a pitchfork carved into his chest. It isn’t us. We’re fine.

I grab the bed rail and place my foot against the base and swing around it, wrapping my other leg around the pole. This is life. I spin three times this way before I sit down on the bed across from Petey. I’m dizzy and Petey deals me seven cards. I look at my cards and like them. “So how’d you get here?” I ask. I might be feeling more talkative than I’ve ever felt. I organize first by color and then by rank. The lights are on. Western is under lockdown. There won’t be school tomorrow, and they’ll feed us in our room. And maybe the day after that, but then Mr. Gracie will come for me, late at night.

“Stealing,” Petey says as an answer, laying a card down, drawing from the deck. “Driving around. I would steal cars.”

“Where would you go?”

“The suburbs.”

What’s done is done. It won’t happen again for a while. I’ll be gone before the next riot. I’ve got my walking papers. They can’t hold me in here forever. They’ll find a placement for me soon. I’ll be transferred. Things will be okay and I’ll start over, like I always do. When I get out I’m going to learn how to fight. I’m going to stop being scared. I’ll change completely.

“And you?” Petey asks.

I sit back on his bunk, back against the wall, the window above my head. I grab Petey’s foot. “Ha,” I say, and shake his foot. I lay down three hearts, the king, the queen, and the jack. That’s ten points each but there’s still an ace that goes on the end and the ace is worth fifteen. I discard a low spade and Petey finishes my run on both sides, with the ace and the ten.

“Generous of you,” he says. We’ll never be this close again.

“I couldn’t stay put,” I tell him, picking one up. I measure my options. One of Petey’s eyes is higher than the other. I should be able to win this. My grandfather was a card player. My father told me once that his dad had bet their house and lost. He used to tell me I looked like my grandfather. I try to answer Petey but I don’t really know the answer. I pull on my nose. “I was in CYS, emergency placement. There were thirty of us in each room and there were four rooms. There was only two staff members and they stayed in the office with the door locked. I tried to ask them when I was getting out but they wouldn’t tell me. Then one of the ladies opened the door and said to me, If you don’t like it here, why don’t you walk away? It’s not like you’re in jail. She had hair on her chin. She was the bearded lady. And it was true, the door was open. So I did it. I just left. And she yelled after me where was I going. I said I was going home. I went back to my old neighborhood, but everyone was gone. And when they caught me they put me here.”

I TAG THE base and stop, grip my legs, take a deep breath, and shake the sweat from my forehead. “I’m too fast,” I tell Sammy, who didn’t catch the ball on time and slaps my side with it anyway. “Safe,” I tell him, nearly falling off the base.

“You think so?” He tosses the ball back to his brother Edward. Fifth grade is going to end in a week. The breeze is blowing hard, it could rain soon.

“Could you imagine being as fast as me?” I ask.

“Must be great,” he says.

“It’s the greatest thing in the world,” I tell him.

Taro is on the other base singing, “That’s the way, uh huh uh huh, I like it.” Four is a good number for a game of running bases, but five is even better, harder to get stuck between the two throwers. With five players you can place the bases further apart. Sometimes Justin plays, but his dad wouldn’t let him out today.

“You’re out,” Edward says.

“Shit,” Taro says. Taro stepped off the base. Taro likes to swear. Two years ago, in third grade, I met Taro in the bathroom and he said, “Motherfucker.” He spit in the urinal and put his hand inside his pants and waited to see what I would do. “That’s nothing,” I told him. “My father says worse things than that all the time. My dad’s a cuss faucet.” Then Taro wrote
Mr. Petak is a jingle balls
on the wall in black marker. He handed me the marker and I drew a balloon with a smiley face on it and wrote
Don’t Pop Me
beneath it. “That’s retarded,” he said. We’ve been best friends ever since.

Taro and Edward switch places and Taro bounces the ball impatiently. Taro’s got a bad temper. Now Edward and I are runners. Edward is bigger than the rest of us, but he’s kind of girly. He’s fat, but not in front like Gus Strylopalus. Edward’s fat hangs around his waist. Sometimes at school people call him sissy. His sisters are fat too, but they don’t look so bad. For bases we use Sammy and Edward’s jackets. We play in the middle of the alley in front of the garage. Sammy and Edward live in the only house on the block, a blue and white house with a big green backyard. Everybody else lives in apartments. I live in the corner building with my father, my mother, and sometimes my father’s girlfriend who comes over and stays for days at a time. He doesn’t think I know she’s his girlfriend. He says she’s there to take care of my mother. My mother is not well. He says Claire is my mother’s best friend, but I don’t think she is.

I’m sprinting under the net and stop at the base. Taro misses the ball that Sammy has launched to him. He had to throw the ball over me; you’re not allowed to hit the runner. The ball bounces down the alley and Taro takes off after it. A dog starts barking. Sammy and I cross each other, then run back again, then again. We do the dance that you do when you steal three bases in a row.

Taro is all the way down at the end of the alley and walking back with the ball in his hand. He’s red-faced. “Why don’t you learn how to throw?” Edward asks Sammy. Sammy is only nine. He’s lucky we play with him.

“I can throw,” Sammy says.

“You throw like a pigeon swims,” Edward says.

“What?”

“Fuck you guys,” Taro says, standing on the base next to Edward. He bounces the ball.

“Shut up,” Sammy says. “My dad will hear you.”

“Fuck your dad,” Taro says. “Fuck your dad twice, with a metal broomstick, in the ass.”

“What did you say?” Edward says, turning around.

“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.