There Are No Children Here (41 page)

“Who you going to snap on, son?” Paul asked.

“Anybody that be selling my dog.”

“Your dog is here in the house somewhere. You have to look for it.”

“You probably got it and sold it,” Lafeyette accused.

“If I had got it and sold it, ain’t nothing you could do about it,” Paul challenged.

“I wish you’d stay out of our house. I don’t know what you be coming back for. You be on the corner with all those dope fiends, embarrassing us.”

“What’d you call me?” Paul walked over to Lafeyette, placed a firm grip on his shoulder, and shook him. “What’d you say?”

Lafeyette jumped up from his chair and, as Paul reached for him, backed up against the living room window. Paul reached for him again. “What’d you call me?”

Lafeyette’s right fist came smashing into the side of his father’s temple. Paul, once the amateur boxer, reeled back as much out of shock as pain, and then assumed the fighter’s stance, his fists moving, circling his son.

“You’re fourteen. You’re of age. You want to be a man, okay, you got a chance to be a man,” Paul told his son. Lafeyette could hold his own, but certainly not with his dad. The jabs hit Lafeyette sharply. In the shoulder. The chest. The armpit. The open-palmed slaps got Lafeyette across the head. Lafeyette didn’t try to fight. He just tried to soften the blows. His eyes glared menacingly at his father, never losing contact. His body rocked from his father’s stinging blows.

“Y’all stop that,” LaJoe screamed as she jumped up from the couch to try to break up the fracas. “Y’all stop it.” She restrained Paul for a moment, enough time for Lafeyette to grab his coat and run for the door. LaJoe and Paul said nothing to each other. LaJoe shared her son’s anger. Paul was hurt by such an affront from his son. Minutes later, Lafeyette appeared at the front door. He held a steel chain in his right hand.

“C’mon outside. C’mon outside,” he yelled at his father. “I’m gonna kick your ass.”

Paul, whose nerves got the better of him in such tense situations, jumped up from the couch and headed toward his son.

“No, Paul!” LaJoe screamed. “Don’t go out there. Y’all cut that out.”

Paul hesitated. So did Lafeyette. “Boy, you don’t know what you’re up against.” Paul pointed his finger at Lafeyette, who looked more scared than anything else. The last thing he wants is for me to come out there, Paul thought. He realized then that he had made a big mistake. He felt ashamed as much for how he had reacted as for putting Lafeyette in such a squeeze. Of course Lafeyette didn’t respect him. For good reason. He sometimes didn’t respect himself.

“LaJoe, talk to your son ’cause I’m having problems getting anything across to him. He don’t want to, he at the point right now where he’s not going to listen to me.” Paul shrugged and sat back down. Lafeyette took a step into the apartment.

“You dope fiend,” Lafeyette muttered. “That’s the reason why you ain’t working now, because you’re a dope fiend.” Paul’s shoulders shrank. He knew no son would hit his father over a lost dog. It was the drugs. They had destroyed his relationship with LaJoe and now with his son. He had never hit Lafeyette before except for occasional spankings when he was younger. It wasn’t his nature. Now, his own children were
turning on him. The only reason he came around was to see his children. He loved them but knew that he was failing them. Lafeyette’s last remarks sapped what spirit and fight he had left. He sank onto the couch and didn’t say a thing. Nor did Lafeyette, who continued to look for Blondie. He found her hiding under the stove.

Every morning, Pharoah went off to summer school at the University of Illinois. He awoke each morning with energy and verve and anticipation. He liked getting away from the neighborhood and the idea of being on a college campus. He also liked being considered a scholar. But his brother was tired. The long summer days dragged, and Lafeyette talked a lot about getting out of Horner. LaJoe told him again they’d move when Terence got out of prison. He and his father, who came around even less now, ignored each other. He kept to himself. He told his mother he’d stop hanging out with “the wrong people.” But he seemed on edge. Ever since Craig’s death in March he’d become more withdrawn. He stopped confiding in his mother. He stopped confiding in anybody.

One early July evening, under a cool drizzle, a group of teenagers on Damen Avenue surrounded a fourteen-year-old boy. LaJoe happened to walk by and could hear the taunts and then the sound of fists smacking. Then she heard a familiar voice. It was Lafeyette’s. “Stop. Don’t hit him. Stop.” Lafeyette sounded frantic. He was in the middle of the fracas, trying to keep the others from beating his friend.

LaJoe ran to the circle and started making her way through. “Mama, make them stop,” Lafeyette pleaded. His friend was doubled over, gripping his stomach.

LaJoe was furious. She turned to the group of kids. “What y’all doing? What y’all doing? Get off of him. What do you accomplish by this? Ain’t you tired? What you beating on him for?” One boy said the surrounded youth had been fighting them. “How he beat on all of you?” LaJoe screamed. The teenagers seemed to listen to her only momentarily. One took a plank of wood and smacked the boy across the back. He doubled over again. It looked as if they might take on her and Lafeyette next.

A familiar voice rang out. “Don’t hit my mama. Now y’all
don’t hit my mama.” It was a friend of Weasel’s, a boy who, like others here, LaJoe had nurtured as a child. “Let ’em go. Ya hear me. They’re straight.” The other boys listened. They dispersed. LaJoe sent the beaten boy home. She and Lafeyette walked back to their building.

LaJoe wiped Lafeyette’s forehead where he’d been nicked with a broken bottle. His face was without emotion: the eyes stared straight ahead, the head never bowed to one side or the other. He never cried. LaJoe would say, “When he laugh, you caught him off guard.” His face seemed incapable of expression.

This evening, as they neared the porch, Lafeyette dropped to his knees. LaJoe wasn’t sure whether he had slipped or whether his legs had just given out. “I’m tired, Mama,” he said. She helped him to his feet. She wondered what he meant by tired. She remembered what Terence had once told her. She believed he was just tired of being.

Dawn answered the knocks on her front door. There stood two housing authority security guards. They told her she was being evicted from her apartment. The CHA had discovered that she’d been living there on someone else’s lease. Dawn had known this would happen eventually, but nevertheless it caught her off guard. She spent the next two days moving what furniture she had back to her mother’s, just across the street. There, she and her four children packed into one room. Demetrius slept where he could, occasionally bedding down in the back seat of his car.

Pharoah worried about growing up. “Maybe when I get a little older, I’ll understand,” he told a friend. “But,” he added after a short pause, “I feel good not understanding.”

LaJoe just noticed it one day. Lafeyette hadn’t said anything about it. On his bedroom wall, he had hung the program from Craig’s funeral. On its cover was a picture of Craig in his mortarboard and graduation gown. LaJoe thought it a good sign. Other than a few asides here and there, he never talked about Craig. This was the first indication she had that he was still grieving for him, four months after his death. Maybe, she
thought, it would help him get over the sudden loss of his friend.

But two weeks later, LaJoe took the picture down. It had given Lafeyette nightmares. One in particular recurred a number of times, startling him awake, sometimes drenching him in sweat. It unnerved him just to talk about it. In the dream, someone—he didn’t know who—was chasing him. But because of a strong wind, he couldn’t run away. And when he tried to call for help, nothing came out of his mouth.

Thirty

   
THE RAINDROPS appeared incandescent in the midafternoon sun, like crystals falling from a chandelier. They looked as if they might shatter on hitting the ground. Pharoah stood by his bedroom window, mesmerized by them.

“Pharoah, let’s get us some fries,” Lafeyette said. Pharoah didn’t hear. As was often the case, he was daydreaming, a prisoner of his thoughts. “Pharoah!” Lafeyette yelled, his adolescent voice rising. “Maaaan, Pharoah. You hear me? Let’s get us some fries.”

In order to get Pharoah’s attention, Lafeyette started to reach across his bed to smack him. But Pharoah heard Lafeyette move up on him and turned around before any blow could be struck.

“It be raining,” he said.

Lafeyette stuck his hand out the open window. “It ain’t raining. Maan, you lying.” Pharoah looked back outside. The rain, indeed, had let up. Bright rays of sunlight tore through the clouds like powerful spotlights. The effect was an eerie one; even the muddiest of puddles seemed to sparkle.

“Come on, you going?” Lafeyette asked.

“Yeah,” Pharoah replied.

The two boys told LaJoe they were going to get some food; they’d be back shortly. They began the two-block walk to a take-out hot dog stand on the corner of Damen and Madison called Main Street. On the way, they ran into Rickey, who asked whether he could join them. They hadn’t seen much of Rickey in recent weeks, especially after he had been arrested and then released a couple of weeks later. They’d heard rumors that Rickey was running drugs for the older boys, making as much as $600 a week. Nonetheless, both Lafeyette and Pharoah were fond of Rickey, as he was of the two brothers. They invited Rickey along.

At Main Street, Rickey bought Pharoah a bag of cheese-coated french fries. Lafeyette bought his own. They stood in the parking lot in front of the hot dog stand, relishing the cool, crisp summer air. Suddenly, Pharoah got excited. He couldn’t quite get the words out. His neck strained; his mouth worked hard. Finally, he just pointed. Arching over the downtown skyscrapers was a rainbow. Its colors were brilliant, as if they’d been painted on the sky’s canvas. Yellow. Green. Blue. Purple. Red. It seemed to emerge out of Lake Michigan and arc over the Sears Tower, setting down again just a mile or so south of Horner. It was the first rainbow the boys had ever seen.

All three—Pharoah, Rickey, and Lafeyette—stood in the middle of the parking lot, munching on their cheese fries, admiring the arc of colors.

“Daaag,” Lafeyette muttered. “I thought it wasn’t any real rainbow.”

“L-l-l …” Pharoah tried again. “Let’s-let’s-let’s …” Rickey and Lafeyette were too taken by the sky’s colors to notice
Pharoah’s stutter. That made it easier for him to slow down, to take his time. If they didn’t see him or hear him or acknowledge his presence, they wouldn’t make fun of his stammer.

“Letsgocbaseit.” He spat the words out so that they wouldn’t get caught in his throat. “Letsgochasetherainbow.”

“Maaan, I ain’t gonna chase no rainbow,” Lafeyette said, deriding his brother’s loony scheme. “That’s kiddie stuff.”

“It-it-it … pro-pro-probbably be some gold there,” Pharoah said. He was getting excited again. He tried to slow down. Maybe they could touch it. “Maybe,” he told Lafeyette and Rickey, “there be leprechauns.”

“Shut up,” Lafeyette said. “Ain’t nothing there.” Rickey laughed heartily at Pharoah’s imagination. He too thought there might be something there, but he didn’t dare say so out loud. Lafeyette might think him foolish. He’d heard if you got to the end of such a thing you could dig and find some treasure. He’d been told that when he was younger. At thirteen he held on, however tenuously, to that hope.

“I’ll go, Pharoah. C’mon,” Rickey said curtly. Lafeyette shook his head.

“Go if you want. Don’t make no sense,” he scoffed.

Pharoah and Rickey trotted south on Damen, their eyes following the rainbow’s arc. It looked as if it might come down right around Cook County Hospital, about a half mile away. They passed Damen Courts, where Pharoah used to go for peace and quiet. It had since been plagued by gangs, so he no longer visited its manicured lawns. They alternately ran and walked still farther south, their heads bobbing up and down from fatigue. As they approached Crane High School, from which Dawn had graduated last summer, Pharoah noticed that thick, milky clouds had begun to hide part of the rainbow. Then he realized it was beginning to fade.