There Are No Children Here (12 page)

So, for starters, it seemed strange that a boy from the new projects would befriend a boy from the old projects. But more surprising was that Rickey and Pharoah would find some bond despite the startling differences between them. Not even Ms. Barone suspected that her two students spent time together.

Where Pharoah was slight, Rickey, in the words of one local policeman, was “built like a pit bull.” For an eleven-year-old, he had unusually solid muscles; he looked far older than his age.

Where Pharoah adored school, Rickey shunned it. He could barely read, and had already been held back a year. He was a year and a half older than Pharoah. Moreover, he had been written up so many times for bad behavior that his anecdotal history at Suder, a compilation of past incidents, was nearly the thickness of a phone book. Once, the police had to be called in to handle him. He frequently got into fistfights, and because he was stronger than most of the other boys, he could do them considerable harm. When he got angry, he used foul language, even with the adults. He once told Ms. Barone to “fuck off.” Ms. Barone sometimes took a nap after school just to recover from her encounters with the class bully.

And where Pharoah tried to keep a distance from the neighborhood’s
violence, Rickey was in the thick of it. Rickey had been with Bird Leg when he died. The two were second cousins. Rickey was one of the younger children whom Bird Leg had befriended, and, like Lafeyette, he had loved being around Bird Leg’s dogs. On the day of the shooting, Bird Leg asked Rickey to hold his radio while he gave chase to the bottle-throwing Disciples. Rickey, though, wanting to help in the chase, put the radio down and joined the battle, hurling bricks at Bird Leg’s assailants. He had heard the lone gunshot and watched his cousin stumble and fall by the cottonwood and die. He then sat on a nearby bench and wept. For the next two days, Rickey stayed in his apartment, refusing to talk or eat. He vomited throughout the weekend. His mother worried that he was ill, but by Monday he started eating again and venturing back outside. The anger about Bird Leg’s death, though, didn’t subside; instead, it simmered and stewed within him. It was two years before he talked to anyone about watching his cousin die.

“I felt like I lost a big brother. I used to think they should of shot him in the leg,” Rickey said later. “Seem like I don’t care no more. I don’t feel sorry for people no more ’cause when they killed Bird Leg, the peoples who shot him mustn’t of felt sorry for him. Like I be playing basketball or something, it seems like I can’t sometimes get it off my mind. It just stay on my mind.”

Often, when Rickey became embroiled in a fight, he began to relive Bird Leg’s last minutes, and as he did so, his anger turned to rage. In class, he once choked another child so long and hard that, in the words of Pharoah, “he put him to sleep.” These flashbacks, which were not unlike those of a traumatized war veteran, haunted Rickey for well over a year after Bird Leg’s death.

“Now, it seems like if I get in a fight, I don’t care if I kill or something. I don’t even care. It be like, we be fighting, we be fighting other people. Someone be telling me in my mind, ‘Hurt him, just don’t worry about it.’ Shhh. I just be thinking about hurting him. It just be pressure on my mind. Things that I be seeing, flashbacks. I just see when Bird Leg just bent down and almost tripped over the chain, then just lay down. I just catch myself right there. If I kill someone, it seems like I’m taking them on for the person who killed Bird Leg.”

Pharoah and others were unaware of the effect that Bird
Leg’s death had had on Rickey. Beneath the raw exterior lay a tender child who addressed many adults as “sir” and “ma’am” and who took the hands of younger children to help them cross the street. LaJoe thought his eyes were filled with sweetness. But it was a guarded softness. When he smiled, he seemed uncomfortable, as if he might be judged as being fragile or accused of being a sissy. There were times, later on, after numerous entanglements with the law and flirtations with the gangs, that Rickey would be standing with older friends on the back stoop of Pharoah’s building, and he couldn’t bring himself to say hello to passing adults or to young children. He would act distant and tough. But at eleven, Rickey didn’t try to—perhaps he couldn’t—hide his kindness.

What cemented Pharoah and Rickey’s friendship was an incident that took place during gym class one day, shortly after Rickey started dating Dede. Another boy, Cortez, had snatched a basketball from Pharoah’s hands. Pharoah was furious. “Give … give … give … it to me!” he demanded. Cortez smiled and dribbled the basketball, taunting Pharoah. Pharoah, who didn’t like to fight, did nothing. Rickey, bigger and stronger than the other fourth-graders, had been watching the dispute from a distance.

“I don’t know, they was arguing in the room. I didn’t pay no attention,” he later recalled. “I was just shooting basketball. Then I looked. He tried to hit Pharoah.” Rickey grabbed the basketball from Cortez and gave it to Pharoah. All seemed settled until a few minutes later, when Cortez went over to Pharoah as he shot baskets and threw him to the ground.

“Cortez, man, why you do that?” Rickey demanded. He walked slowly up to Cortez and, before he could resist, put him in a headlock until he begged Rickey to let him go. Rickey then pummeled him. “Poom! Poom! Poom! Then I stopped,” he recalled. “Everybody picks on Pharoah ’cause he’s so short and he doesn’t like to fight. It just feel like he’s a little brother to me.” Cortez left Pharoah alone after that.

To the adults of the neighborhood, Rickey’s friendship with Pharoah seemed odd. Perhaps Rickey considered Pharoah family, since he was now dating his cousin. Or maybe, torn between his desire to bully and to embrace, Rickey felt he had found someone with whom he had no choice but to be friends.
Pharoah, after all, would have been no match for Rickey in a fight. Most likely, both reasons explain Rickey’s attraction to Pharoah.

From Pharoah’s perspective, the friendship was easier to understand. Rickey offered Pharoah protection; he was a trusted friend. When Rickey had money, he would give some to Pharoah. Though he never said as much to Pharoah, it was understood that he wouldn’t let anything happen to him.

Lafeyette was wary of his brother’s new friend. “I worry about Pharoah a lot,” Lafeyette explained. “I don’t want anything to happen to him, because he’s my little brother. I’m supposed to watch after him. He makes me mad at times but I still love him.”

He was proud of how well Pharoah did at school. A smart child himself, Lafeyette never took school as seriously as Pharoah did. He had already been held back a year. His attendance record at times was woeful: in 1986, he missed thirty-five days and received a D average. The excuses varied: flu, stomachache, chicken pox, no clean clothes to wear. Sometimes he missed days because of suspensions resulting from fights in school. He secretly wished his mother would push him more, make him go to sleep early, make him do his homework. LaJoe conceded that she could be too soft on her children, though she wanted nothing more than to see Lafeyette and Pharoah graduate from high school.

Despite his poor attendance record, however, Lafeyette tested particularly well in his favorite subject, math. When he did attend school with some regularity, as in fourth grade, he earned a B—average. And when he reached seventh grade, he would earn A’s in math and science. His teacher this fall, in sixth grade, Ruby Everage, liked him. She found that when Lafeyette came to school, he wanted to learn and was earnest about his work. Lafeyette grew fond of Mrs. Everage and, toward the second half of the year, attended school with greater regularity and helped throw a surprise party for her. She was about to leave to have a child.

On occasion, Lafeyette skipped gym class to talk privately with Mrs. Everage about problems at home or in the neighborhood. Lafeyette told her how he sometimes found himself daydreaming
in class, worrying about his brothers and sisters. He struck her as a sensitive child, as someone who had a lot on his mind. She told him, as she would others, that there was hope, that indeed there was a life outside Horner. She’d take her students on numerous field trips to places like the Museum of Science and Industry and the Robert Crown Center for Performing Arts to prove her point.

It especially frustrated Lafeyette that his younger brother refused to fight. He worried that if Pharoah couldn’t stand up for himself, he’d get mauled by the older boys. So Lafeyette believed he had an obligation to toughen him up. He’d badger Pharoah—sometimes calling him “fag” and “punk”—and slap him until he could take it no longer and would begin to flail back.

“You gotta fight,” Lafeyette would tell him. “I ain’t gonna be there all the time to fight for you. C’mon. C’mon. Hit me.”

Pharoah would beg his brother to let him be and, if that didn’t succeed, would appeal to their mother for help. He didn’t want to fight.

“It ain’t right,” Pharoah said to Lafeyette. “Why’s people fighting people?”

“That’s stupid,” Lafeyette countered.

Lafeyette talked to his mother. Wasn’t there something she could do to keep Pharoah away from Rickey, who undoubtedly would get Pharoah into trouble? It was, to be sure, a peculiar match: the bully and the bookworm. And so it came as no surprise to Pharoah that his brother would disapprove of his friendship with Rickey.

“Hey, man, he only gonna get you in trouble,” Lafeyette warned Pharoah.

“You … you … you ain’t my father,” Pharoah retorted, walking away from his brother.

“He too old for you to be with,” Lafeyette yelled after him.

But the friendship persisted despite Lafeyette’s efforts to keep the two boys apart—and, ironically, in the end it was Lafeyette who would be more influenced by Rickey than Pharoah was.

Nine

   
THE JANUARY SUN had barely risen above the Loop’s glass skyscrapers when Pharoah, who had just awakened, picked the two dead goldfish from their bowl and dropped them into a plastic bag. As he walked through the building’s breezeway into the early morning quiet, he stopped to look around for an appropriate resting place. He chose a spot just to the left of the breezeway, a piece of lawn that edged right up to the building. Few people walk here, he figured; the grave, might remain untrampled.

With an ice cream stick in hand, Pharoah dug into the frozen
ground. The stick cracked a little, but Pharoah reinforced it with his thumb and index finger, and kept digging until he had made a hole a couple of inches deep. He removed the once orange fish—in death, they had turned a cloudy gray—and gently lowered them into the ground.

“God bless these fish,” he recited solemnly. “Don’t let them go up to hell. Let them go to heaven.”

He had already cried for three hours when he found his pets floating belly up in their bowl the night before. (“I fed ’em too much,” he concluded.) They had been a Christmas present from his mother, and he had named them Abraham and Goldberg after characters on the television series
Diff’rent Strokes
. He wasn’t going to cry again. He silently covered the fish with the crusty soil.

With all that swirled about Pharoah this winter, the death of his two fish seemed incidental. But it was, at least, one crisis he could deal with himself, one that he could comprehend.

The apartment was too crowded, LaJoe knew, but she didn’t have the heart to kick anyone out. Her children had no place to go.

Shortly before Christmas, LaShawn, the oldest, had moved back home. She brought with her a small entourage: her boyfriend, her boyfriend’s brother, and her two children, Tyisha, who was seven, and Darrell, who had just turned one. Everyone called him Baldheaded except Pharoah, who insisted on calling him Sir Baldheaded.

LaShawn and her children had been renting a room in a tenement with friends, but they ended up not getting along. LaJoe worried that LaShawn might be harmed when her boyfriend, Brian, went to work. Brian sold fake gold jewelry to unsuspecting tourists at O’Hare Airport, where he worked every day. LaJoe had also been concerned about her daughter’s ability to take care of her two children, given her drug habit. She smoked Karachi, a potent mixture of Pakistini heroin and amphetamines. The drug was rarely injected, but rather smoked. It was particularly popular on the city’s west side.