There Are No Children Here (26 page)

Porkchop’s grinning face poked through the door. Pharoah looked at his father and stood up to leave. “Daddy, ’bye, I’m going.” Pharoah hopped out of the room. Paul couldn’t help cracking a smile.

Eighteen

   
AS IT DID EVERY WINTER, the temperature in the apartment approached a dry, crackling 85 degrees. Stripping down to their underwear was of no relief to Lafeyette and Pharoah; it was like being inside an oven. Their only remedy was to open a window, even in the dead of winter, but then they had to put up with a frigid draft. Pharoah had developed a blistering cough; his throat was parched and sore. The scorching heat tired the boys and put everyone on edge.

LaJoe wanted to find some excuse to get them out of the
apartment. Weekends were the worst. Besides the Boys Club, the kids had nowhere to go, so they would sit around all day. As Christmas approached, LaJoe wanted to do something special, for herself and the children. She had already promised them they would be getting bunk beds for the holidays, but that was beginning to seemed unlikely. After buying the children their Christmas presents, she didn’t have the money for the beds. They’d have to wait until spring.

LaJoe decided to take the younger ones to see the Christmas windows downtown, something she had done with her mother as a child. The triplets had never before been in the Loop; Pharoah, only a couple of times. LaJoe didn’t think to ask Lafeyette. She figured he’d feel too grown for such a tour.

So on a Thursday after school, two weeks before Christmas and a few days after she’d won $38 playing cards, LaJoe gathered the children. In addition to Pharoah and the triplets, she invited three of her grandchildren, Tyisha, Baldheaded, and Snuggles, and a friend of the triplets whom everyone called Esther B.

She walked the young battalion to Madison Street, where they hopped the bus and where all the kids, including ten-year-old Pharoah, got on for free. As LaJoe and the eight youngsters filed on, the driver joked, “Next time you get on the bus, you pay nine dollars.” LaJoe, already tired, managed a half smile. The trip, she hoped, would lift her spirits.

“Why’s that window so clean?”

“Where them lights come from?”

“Ooooh, look at them tall buildings.”

“Them’s glass.”

“No, they ain’t.”

“Is too.”

“If a hurricane hit them buildings, everybody gonna die. The glass will get them.”

“Ain’t no hurricane gonna hit it.”

“Stop lying.”

And so the banter went as the bus was swallowed by the city’s downtown; the skyscrapers seemed to rise forever into the darkening sky. The children tried to look straight up, to spot the buildings’ tops, but, with their necks craning back as far as they would go and their faces pressed against the bus windows,
their warm breath clouded the glass. Frantically, they rubbed off the mist as they caught a few more glimpses of the high-rises that dared to tower over their own.

LaJoe began to share their excitement. “When we’re through,” she promised the distracted crew, “I’ll buy you some popcorn like you never tasted before.” She remembered the popcorn her mother treated her to when as a young girl she had visited her at her job in the downtown county building. LaJoe was beginning to feel a part of an ordinary family, a family without problems.

“Here you go, ma’am,” the bus driver told LaJoe as he pulled up to State Street, home of the downtown’s major department stores and their elaborate Christmas windows. The children pushed and tumbled off the bus.

“Ain’t no one going anywhere,” LaJoe shouted. All except Pharoah, who felt he was big enough to go it on his own, clamored to hold LaJoe’s hands. “I can’t hold you all. Pharoah! Pharoah!” she called. But Pharoah was mesmerized by the afternoon rush. Men in suits and ties walked past him, their eyes focused straight ahead, their faces fixed with determination. And the women. They looked so pretty in their long wool coats, brightly colored scarves draped around their rosy faces. He twirled 180 degrees as his gaze followed one passerby after another.

“Pharoah!” LaJoe shouted again, “
PHAROAH
!” He drew upright at the sound of his name, which for the past minute had fluttered by him like the rush-hour shoppers. “Pharoah, take Tammie’s and Tiffany’s hands.” He gripped the bare hands of the two five-year-olds. Tyisha grabbed Timothy and Snuggles. LaJoe picked up Baldheaded in one arm and held Esther B. with the other. Like paper chains, the eight of them floated down State Street, in and around the hurried businessmen and women, toward the crowds surrounding the windows.

The children screamed in delight at the sight of the two-foot-high mechanical children in the windows, some singing carols, two celebrating Christmas in a spaceship. “Are they real little kids?” Timothy asked.

“No,” LaJoe told him. “Them’s dolls and they make them move by battery.”

“I wish I could go in there and live with them,” Timothy said.

The kids argued. Was it real or fake snow? How about all the Santas ringing bells on the street corners? How could there be so many? “Them Santa Clauses just want money to buy people gifts,” Pharoah explained to the younger ones. Pharoah himself had begun to doubt Santa’s existence. “I don’t think there’s a Santa Claus,” he whispered to his mother. “I don’t think he could make it in every state in one day. He couldn’t go to Detroit in one whole day.”

Pharoah guided LaJoe and the others from window to window, block to block. He’d fly ahead of the pack, with Tammie and Tiffany as his wings. “Mama, come see this! Mama, come see this!” he’d scream. At one window, Pharoah read for the little ones: “Singing carols on the steps of the Art Institute has a way of making even Scrooge look cute … There’s Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit from Dickens’ past. But who’s teasing the dogs?”

“Perfect,” said a young couple who had stopped to listen. Pharoah smiled proudly.

LaJoe led the children to McDonald’s, where they ate and talked feverishly. “Where we going next?” they asked. “Mama, where?”

“One more stop. The big Christmas tree,” she told them.

They hiked one more block, where they oohed and aahed at the huge city tree, which was actually tens of smaller trees neatly sculptured to look like one. “Is that God’s tree?” Tiffany asked. “It’s almost in the sky.”

“No, that’s everybody’s tree. But God probably be around here somewhere,” LaJoe told them, as their small bodies moved in rhythm to the Christmas carols emanating mysteriously from the tree’s center. Finally, LaJoe brought them to Garrett’s, a downtown popcorn emporium, where, despite Pharoah’s protestations that she keep the rest of the money for herself, she bought them two huge bags, one of cheese-flavored and the other of caramel popcorn. She popped a kernel of each in each of their mouths as they giggled and chewed and asked for more. It was, they told LaJoe, the best popcorn they’d ever had.

On the bus ride home, Tiffany and Tammie walked up and down the aisle and in clear and precise tones, meant to imitate
adults’, said to each other and the other children: “Oh, we had a lovely day. Didn’t you have a lovely day?” Before long, all eight had joined in the game. “Oh, we had a lovely time, Mama,” one would say to the giggles of the others. LaJoe sat back in the seat, her head against the cold window. She was physically exhausted, but, in an odd sort of way, had more energy than she had had in a long time. It felt good to see the children giddy with excitement. They seemed so unencumbered. She promised herself she’d take the children on more trips. It gave them—and her—such satisfaction. “Oh, what a lovely day,” she repeated to herself, imitating her daughters. She laughed softly.

Pharoah, too, sat in the bus exhausted. It had been an extraordinary day for him. He got to help his mother take care of the kids and to read to them from one of the windows. But more than that, he liked just spending time with his mother. He wished she’d take him on more trips. “I’d like to go again, Mama,” he told LaJoe.

“Me too.” LaJoe smiled and patted Pharoah’s head.

LaJoe’s only regret was that she hadn’t asked Lafeyette. She didn’t think he would have wanted to go; he would have thought himself too old for such a tour. But when they got home, Lafeyette was seated on the couch.

“Why didn’t you take me, too?” he demanded.

“I didn’t think you’d want to see a Santa Claus and a Christmas tree and the windows with all those dolls in it,” she said.

“I wanted to go.”

Next time, LaJoe promised herself. She had to remind herself that Lafeyette, despite his adult worries, was still a thirteen-year-old boy.

Lafeyette got angry when he heard the news. There was no way their brother could go to prison for ten years. No way. He wasn’t
that
bad. When LaJoe had told Lafeyette, all he could muster was “I hope Terence get less time than ten years.” He then disappeared into the bathroom, where he remained for nearly half an hour. Like his father, he felt his stomach tie up into knots when he got anxious. He had terrible bouts of diarrhea.

When Pharoah heard that his brother might be sent away for ten years, his face dropped. “I be thinking,” he told his mother,
“why they be locking people up and taking them away from their parents?” LaJoe tried to explain why it happened; it was a form of punishment for Terence’s doing something wrong.

“If he get the ten years, then he’ll be home when he’s twenty-eight. I’ll be twenty,” Pharoah said, calculating the years with his fingers.

“Y’all just will have to catch up a little,” LaJoe told him. “That’ll be all right.” LaJoe was concerned about Pharoah because his teacher had called her one afternoon after school and said that Pharoah had been daydreaming a lot in his class. Was there something wrong? the teacher had asked LaJoe. She suspected Pharoah was troubled about Terence. Neither Pharoah nor Lafeyette liked to let his mother in on his worries, because he thought it would just burden her more. As a result, a lot went unspoken.

“Terence is gonna be a man about what they give him,” LaJoe assured Pharoah. “And you have to be a man for him also, no matter what they do. You have to be Pharoah and you can’t worry about Terence if it make you to the point you have to daydream, thinking on him. Your brother’s gonna be all right, so don’t worry about him.”

“Mama,” Pharoah interrupted, “I’m just too young to understand how life really is.”

The prosecution had offered Terence ten years if he would agree to plead guilty. That may have seemed an outrageous offer, particularly since he adamantly proclaimed his innocence. But Terence had been arrested again. Another armed robbery. Only this time, the police had substantial incriminating evidence.

Over the summer, Terence, while out on bond, had been determined to stay out of trouble. He spent some afternoons and evenings shining shoes at the airport, but mostly he lounged in the bedroom he shared with Weasel. Friends would visit him there. He didn’t leave the apartment much. He felt good about his public defender, Audrey Natcone. She cared and she believed him. Nonetheless, Terence didn’t share her optimism about his getting off. Hadn’t he once spent five months in detention for a crime he hadn’t done? No one came to his rescue then, he thought. Luck saved him. Had the girl he’d allegedly shot not come forward and changed her testimony, he might have
been sent to prison. Because of the severity of the alleged crime, aggravated battery with a gun, he would have been tried as an adult. The judge could have sent him away for ten years. He just didn’t trust the system.
They
didn’t listen.
They
didn’t understand. So if
they
thought he was a bad guy, if they wanted him to be a bad guy, then he’d be a bad guy. If
they
wanted to put him away for something he didn’t do, then he’d give them something to put him away with. It was a tangled and tragic form of reasoning, but then it was a tangled and tragic life that had got him into trouble. It was his own confused method of seeking justice. And so he told a friend over the summer, perhaps somewhat presciently, “Man, they ain’t gonna convict me with something I ain’t do like that. I’m gonna give them something to convict me for.”

On September 5, Terence and an acquaintance held up Mazury Tavern, a working-class bar on the city’s north side. The stories vary. Terence says he went for a car ride with a few friends, only to learn that they’d planned a robbery. They paid Terence a few hundred dollars to stand as the lookout.