There Are No Children Here (2 page)

One

   
NINE-YEAR-OLD Pharoah Rivers stumbled to his knees. “Give me your hand,” ordered his older brother, Lafeyette, who was almost twelve. “Give me your hand.” Pharoah reached upward and grabbed hold of his brother’s slender fingers, which guided him up a slippery, narrow trail of dirt and brush.

“C’mon, man,” Lafeyette urged, as his stick-thin body whirled around with a sense of urgency. “Let’s go.” He paused to watch Pharoah struggle through a thicket of vines. “Man, you slow.” He had little patience for the smaller boy’s clumsiness.
Their friends had already reached the top of the railroad overpass.

It was a warm Saturday afternoon in early June, and this was the children’s first visit to these railroad tracks. The trains passed by at roof level above a corridor of small factories on the city’s near west side. To reach the tracks the children had to scale a steep mound of earth shoved against one side of the aging concrete viaduct. Bushes and small trees grew in the soil alongside the tracks; in some places the brush was ten to fifteen feet thick.

Pharoah clambered to the top, moving quickly to please his brother, so quickly that he scraped his knee on the crumbling cement. As he stood to test his bruised leg, his head turned from west to east, following the railroad tracks, five in all, leading from the western suburbs to Chicago’s downtown. His wide eyes and his buck teeth, which had earned him the sobriquet Beaver and kept his lips pushed apart, made him seem in awe of the world.

Looking east, Pharoah marveled at the downtown skyline. With the late afternoon sun reflecting off the glass and steel skyscrapers, downtown Chicago glowed in the distance. As he looked south a few blocks, he glimpsed the top floors of his home, a red brick, seven-story building. It appeared dull and dirty even in the brilliant sun. Farther south, he could just make out his elementary school and the towering spire of the First Congregational Baptist Church, a 118-year-old building that he’d been told had been a stop on the Underground Railroad. The view, he thought, was pretty great.

But he soon was distracted by more immediate matters. A black-and-yellow butterfly wove effortlessly through the wind. Fixed on its dance, Pharoah stared silently for minutes, until a rising summer breeze carried it away. The abundant clumps of white and lavender wildflowers that grew along the rails soon won his attention, so he bent down to touch the soft petals, to finger the vines as if to measure their growth. He breathed in the scent of the blossoming wood anemones, then licked a salty drop of perspiration that had dropped from his brow. The humidity had already begun to tire him.

Lafeyette jostled his brother from behind. “Stop it,” Pharoah screeched, swatting at his brother as if he were an annoying
pest. Lafeyette reached for Pharoah, but the younger one scampered away. Lafeyette laughed. He could be rough in his play, which annoyed Pharoah. Sometimes, their mother called Lafeyette “Aggravatin’,” as in “Aggravatin’, get over here,” or “Aggravatin’, stop aggravatin’ your brother.” Lafeyette took the ribbing good-naturedly.

He thrust a crowbar into Pharoah’s hands, one of four they and their six friends had dragged to the top of the viaduct. They had ventured onto these railroad tracks only once before, and then just to explore. Back then, though, they hadn’t had a mission.

The eight boys split into pairs, trying to be soft afoot, but in the excitement their whispers quickly turned to muffled shouts as their arms hacked away at the high weeds. One boy walked tightrope along a rail, his young limbs bending and twisting with each gust of wind. His companions ordered him down.

Pharoah glued himself to his cousin Leonard Anderson, whom everyone called Porkchop. A couple of years younger than Pharoah, Porkchop was unusually quiet and shy, though filled with a nervous energy that kept him in constant motion. He grinned rather than talked. The cousins were inseparable; when they met after school—each attended a different one—they frequently greeted each other with a warm embrace.

Lafeyette wandered off with James Howard, a close friend, who lived in the same building. They had grown up together and knew each other well, though James, a wiry, athletic boy, was a year older than Lafeyette and was much more agile. He also was a more easygoing boy than Lafeyette; his mischievous grin spanned the width of his face in the shape of a crescent moon.

Lafeyette and James found what they thought might be a good spot, a small bare patch in the brown dirt. Lafeyette plunged the short end of the crowbar into the ground. He did it again. And again. The soil gave way only a couple of inches with each plunge of the makeshift shovel. James fell to his knees. His small hands unearthed a few more inches, taking over for Lafeyette and the crowbar. Nothing.

“Daaag,” muttered James, clearly disappointed. “There ain’t nothing up here.” Again, they noisily plowed through the weeds.

The boys were looking for snakes. For another hour, they dug hole after hole in the hard soil, determined not to go home empty-handed. They figured that a garter snake would do well at home as a pet; after all, they thought, the snake neither bites nor grows to a great length. The boys had got the idea for this urban safari when last year an older friend named William had nabbed a garter snake and showed it off to all the kids. William let them touch it and hold it and watch it slither across the brown linoleum tiles of their building’s breezeway. Lafeyette had never touched such an animal before, and he and the others had eagerly crowded around William’s pet, admiring its yellow-and-black coat and its darting orange tongue. William died a few months later when a friend, fooling around with a revolver he thought was unloaded, shot William in the back of the head. Lafeyette never learned what happened to the snake.

The boys’ search turned up little, though that might have been expected; they had never seen a snake in the wild and didn’t really know where to look. But they did find three small white eggs resting on the ground, and debated whether they held baby reptiles or birds. James spotted the only animal of the afternoon, a foot-long rat. It had scampered alongside the tracks, sniffing for a treasure of its own.

Bored by the fruitless search, Pharoah and Porkchop had long ago wandered to a stretch along the tracks where there was a ten-foot-high stack of worn automobile tires. The cousins scrambled in and out of the shallow rubber tunnels created by the tires. Porkchop, the more daring of the two, climbed to the top of the pile, bouncing off the tires with abandon. Pharoah stood to the side, watching his cousin’s antics, until a sparrow began to fly over his head in what seemed like threatening loops. Pharoah screamed with a mixture of fear and delight as he tried to avoid the dive-bombing playmate.

James, who had also given up the hunt, hoisted himself into an empty boxcar on one of the sidetracks. As Lafeyette tried to follow, a friend sighted a commuter train approaching from downtown. “There’s a train!” he yelled. James frantically helped Lafeyette climb into the open boxcar, where they found refuge in a dark corner. Others hid behind the boxcar’s huge wheels. Pharoah and Porkchop threw themselves headlong into the weeds, where they lay motionless on their bellies. “Keep
quiet,” came a voice from the thick bushes. “Shut up,” another barked.

The youngsters had heard that the suburb-bound commuters, from behind the tinted train windows, would shoot at them for trespassing on the tracks. One of the boys, certain that the commuters were crack shots, burst into tears as the train whisked by. Some of the commuters had heard similar rumors about the neighborhood children and worried that, like the cardboard lions in a carnival shooting gallery, they might be the target of talented snipers. Indeed, some sat away from the windows as the train passed through Chicago’s blighted core. For both the boys and the commuters, the unknown was the enemy.

The train passed without incident, and soon most of the boys had joined James and Lafeyette in the boxcar, sitting in the doorway, their rangy legs dangling over the side. Lafeyette and James giggled at a private joke, their thin bodies shivering with laughter.

Pharoah was too small to climb into the car, so he crouched in the weeds nearby, his legs tucked underneath him, and picked at the vegetation, which now reached his neck. He was lost in his thoughts, thoughts so private and fanciful that he would have had trouble articulating them to others. He didn’t want to leave this place, the sweet smell of the wildflowers and the diving sparrow. There was a certain tranquillity here, a peacefulness that extended into the horizon like the straight, silvery rails. In later months, with the memory of the place made that much gentler by the passage of time, Pharoah would come to savor this sanctuary even more.

None of the boys was quite ready to call it a day, but the sun had descended in the sky, and nighttime here was dangerous. Reluctantly, they gathered the crowbars, slid down the embankment, and, as Lafeyette took Pharoah’s hand to cross the one busy street, began the short trek home.

Two

   
THE CHILDREN called home “Hornets” or, more frequently, “the projects” or, simply, the “jects” (pronounced
jets
). Pharoah called it “the graveyard.” But they never referred to it by its full name: the Governor Henry Horner Homes.

Nothing here, the children would tell you, was as it should be. Lafeyette and Pharoah lived at 1920 West Washington Boulevard, even though their high-rise sat on Lake Street. Their building had no enclosed lobby; a dark tunnel cut through the middle of the building, and the wind and strangers passed
freely along it. Those tenants who received public aid had their checks sent to the local currency exchange, since the building’s first-floor mailboxes had all been broken into. And since darkness engulfed the building’s corridors, even in the daytime, the residents always carried flashlights, some of which had been handed out by a local politician during her campaign.

Summer, too, was never as it should be. It had become a season of duplicity.

On June 13, a couple of weeks after their peaceful afternoon on the railroad tracks, Lafeyette celebrated his twelfth birthday. Under the gentle afternoon sun,
yellow daisies
poked through the cracks in the sidewalk as children’s bright faces peered out from behind their windows. Green leaves clothed the cotton-woods, and pastel cotton shirts and shorts, which had sat for months in layaway, clothed the children. And like the fresh buds on the crabapple trees, the children’s spirits blossomed with the onset of summer.