There Are No Children Here (32 page)

“Clean it up right like everybody else,” he chastened Pharoah, who glared at his brother, “
CLEAN IT UP
!”

As Lafeyette left, Pharoah muttered under his breath, softly enough that his brother wouldn’t hear, but loud enough to retain his pride, “Shut up.”

The house had echoed with cacophony as the six children fought and cleaned and called each other names. Lafeyette swept a pile of garbage onto the slat of cardboard they used for a dustpan, and placed it in another full garbage bag.

“Start getting up this trash. Didn’t I tell y’all?” Lafeyette barked at no one in particular. “Tyisha, take this out. You ain’t taken but one.” As Tyisha lugged the second bag out the door, mumbling her gripes under her breath, she took her uncle on.

“Sissy!” she shouted, running out the door, the bag bumping and clanging against the floor.

“I told you not to call me that,
YOU HEAR ME
? I told you not to call me that!” Tyisha was by then too far down the hall to hear or to care.

Long after the others had stopped cleaning, Lafeyette continued to arrange the chairs and coffee table so that they looked neat and orderly and to sweep the linoleum and rugs. He straightened the pendulum clock that hung in the kitchen and that permanently read 5:25, the time it read when Lelia Mae gave it to LaJoe as a present. It had stopped working on its first day. Lafeyette fidgeted with the collection of knickknacks and mementoes on the two diamond-shaped metal shelves, which were rickety and wobbly to the touch. As if playing three-card monte, he switched around the framed color photographs of each of the triplets as well as framed pictures of himself and Pharoah. He straightened a six-inch-high pair of white hands in prayer and moved forward on the shelf a green ceramic frog, which was missing its right front leg. And he picked up an iron likeness of a grazing horse. He held up the statuette and admired its grace and beauty and then put it back. It was as if he were looking for answers from the stallion.

The younger children quickly learned, in these days and weeks following Craig’s death, that it was best to leave Lafeyette alone; he had become irritable and, on occasion, violent, like the time he punched Pharoah in the eye, all because Pharoah tried to finesse a seat by the window in a friend’s car. “I’m gonna tell Mama,” Pharoah had threatened through his tears. “When we get outta here nothing’s gonna stop me from hitting you with a rock.”

Lafeyette, despite his orneriness and unusually hot temper, had shrugged and laughed nervously; he had not meant to hit his brother with such force. It was a period during which Lafeyette didn’t seem in touch with himself; his anger and sorrow were tangled inside him, his moods shifting wildly.

He waffled between outbursts of fury and revenge to times when he was tolerant, if not generous and mature. On a March afternoon, when Lafeyette was playing Atari with a friend in a seventh-floor apartment, they heard someone laughing. It sounded as if whoever it was was right outside. The boys opened the window. The voice was coming from above. Lafeyette twisted his head outside and looked up. There was a boy named Bubbles, his head hanging over the roof’s edge.

“Bubbles,” Lafeyette yelled, “I’m gonna tell your mama.” He hoped that that might be reason for the boy, who was only ten, to retreat. Lafeyette worried that he might fall. But Bubbles didn’t respond, so Lafeyette ran out the front door of the apartment; the gate leading to the roof had been jimmied open. Lafeyette sprinted up the flight of stairs.

“C’mon, man!” he yelled at Bubbles. “Get down.” Bubbles came toward Lafeyette, who grabbed him by the collar and hauled him down the stairs. “Somebody needs to watch him,” Lafeyette told his friend. He also felt that the housing authority should provide better security. The gate’s padlock, he knew, could be pried open easily with a crowbar.

Lafeyette rarely spoke about Craig, though occasionally he’d go upstairs to sit by the side of Craig’s girlfriend, often in silence. It was there one afternoon that he read a poem Craig had written shortly before he died and that, in its prescience, and like the death of Bird Leg, haunted Lafeyette.

Under the exclamation point, instead of a dot, Craig had drawn a heart.

LaJoe didn’t know what to do with Lafeyette. He wouldn’t talk about what had happened. And he looked tired and worn. His new gait no longer made him seem cocky or angry; it just made him look old, bent over like an aged man.

Pharoah hadn’t been as strongly affected by Craig’s death. He figured the cop was just doing his duty and had gotten the wrong guy. When tragedy struck, Pharoah didn’t want to know. He continued to tell his mother he was too young to comprehend it all, as if he were trying to prolong his childhood, to keep it from passing him by as quickly as it had Lafeyette. But he too worried about his brother. “ ’Cause he’s getting older, they’ll probably try to use him in the gangs,” he would say.

One evening Lafeyette, who hadn’t talked much since the funeral, told LaJoe, “Mama, I’m real tired. I could go outside and don’t have to come back. Anytime I go outside, I ain’t guaranteed to come back.”

LaJoe felt Lafeyette had begun to recognize his own mortality, to begin to come to terms with death. Once, he asked of a friend whether he’d ever considered taking his own life, of just walking in front of a car and ending it.

“Lafeyette be telling me how tired he is, and I always ask him this because I made a mistake with Terence once,” LaJoe said. “Terence used to tell me he was tired, but I used to think he was tired from just being tired and I’d say, ‘go lay down.’ But Terence didn’t mean that. Terence meant he was just tired with what was going on. So that made me in the habit of asking now when they say they’re tired, ‘What you mean, you tired?’ ”

A month later, amid a round of semi-automatic gunfire outside the apartment’s window, LaJoe shepherded the triplets and Pharoah into the hallway for safety. She couldn’t, though, get
Lafeyette to join them. He continued to sit calmly and watch television on the small black-and-white set in his sister’s room as the powerful percussion of the shooting forced Pharoah to cover his ears.

Twenty-three

   
THE SIX BOYS posed for the camera. The house music of the west side nightclub blared behind them. Like royalty, Rickey, who had got caught shoplifting videocassettes with Lafeyette, sat slumped in a broad-backed wicker chair, his legs spread wide, as if to show the others he could take up as much space as he cared to. His subjects surrounded him. Two knelt at his side. The other three stood behind him. All displayed four fingers, the sign of the Four Corner Hustlers. The camera captured one boy blowing a bubble and another smirking. They held their heads high and
narrowed their eyes menacingly. All looked cocky and defiant. Except for one. Dressed like the others in jeans, starter jacket, and high-top sneakers, he had an expression of consternation. His deep-set eyes weren’t a shield, as they were for the others. His stare wasn’t meant to keep others away; it wasn’t meant to hide his fears and insecurities. Instead, it seemed like an opening, exposing his hurt and loneliness. He looked like a wounded animal seeking help. He looked as if he didn’t really want to be there. It was Lafeyette.

Rickey and Lafeyette hung together a lot now, and that didn’t bode well for Lafeyette. For $5.00, they had had this photo taken at the Factory, a nightclub that catered to teenagers. The boys had begun attending the Factory on Friday and Saturday nights; it was a place to be among friends and dance and meet girls.

Rickey and his buddies formed the Four Corner Hustlers. They weren’t a real gang, like Jimmie Lee’s Conservative Vice Lords. They didn’t run drugs; for the most part, they were young boys, only thirteen or fourteen. But they controlled their turf. They were like a training brigade for the real thing.

In huge white lettering, Rickey and his friends had declared their building their castle. They had drawn an enormous numeral 4 with a C and an H adorning it. That was followed by the word
SOLID
. The boys had commandeered a vacant apartment, which they used as a clubhouse. It had a couch, a television, and a VCR. They got a padlock for the door. Each boy wore an earring in his left ear. The jewelry always had four points for Four Corners. Rickey had given Lafeyette a silver earring in the shape of a cross.

LaJoe felt the distance growing between herself and Lafeyette. He had, for one thing, become interested in girls. He’d been dating a girl named Red, and he asked LaJoe whether she liked her. It doesn’t matter what I feel, she had told him. What’s important is whether you like her. LaJoe warned him, though, that he should use a condom when he was ready to have sex. He didn’t want to be a father yet, she told him. Lafeyette said that he didn’t want to have children, not for a long while, “not till I turn twenty-eight.” It was to be the only time Lafeyette would talk openly with his mother about girls.

But it wasn’t his interest in the opposite sex that worried her.
After all, what could be more normal for a thirteen-year-old—as long as he didn’t get anyone pregnant. She fretted, instead, about his friendship with Rickey.

She had asked Lafeyette not to hang out with Rickey anymore. It wasn’t that she still didn’t find his friend sweet and good-natured. She, like Pharoah, was fond of him. He never lied to her, and he never misbehaved around her. Except once. And that’s when she began to realize that he might not be a good influence on her son. One afternoon, she had watched from a street corner as he smashed the window of a stopped car and snatched the driver’s necklace. She couldn’t believe how brazen he’d been. He’d done it in broad daylight—and with neighbors watching, no less. She told Lafeyette not to hang out with him. But Lafeyette didn’t listen. And LaJoe didn’t persist. When Lafeyette got sent home from school for wearing his earring and the school officials tagged him as a gang member, she felt Lafeyette slipping away. It was, she began to fear, Terence all over again.

Rickey had grown more troubled. His mother had little control over him. She’d entertained the idea of sending him to a group home, a move he adamantly opposed. Rickey and his friends had begun drinking cheap red wine—“the kind,” he would say, “that makes you wanna fight”—and smoking marijuana. (Very few kids experimented with the harder drugs like cocaine and heroin.) They also played with guns. One night, high on wine and reefer, Rickey’s closest friend, Terrell, pulled out a gun. He turned to another boy, CeeCee. “I’m gonna shoot you.”

Terrell shot twice at CeeCee’s feet, hitting nothing but grass. The third time, he shot only inches from CeeCee’s neck. The fourth time, he shot CeeCee in his left arm. Terrell pointed the gun a fifth time at CeeCee, but it just clicked. He had emptied the chamber. Someone called an ambulance for CeeCee, who refused to tell the authorities who had shot him.

Rickey used guns mostly to shoot at Disciples who dared venture on the Four Corners’ turf. “I can get a gun anytime I want to,” he once boasted. But, he added, “I don’t never try to shoot them in the head. Just in the feets.”

But while Rickey seemed one of the toughest brutes in the neighborhood, he was confused and torn about what he was
becoming. When most thirteen-year-olds are looking forward to growing older, Rickey told Lafeyette he wished he were younger, that he were eight years old again. “Just to skip over things that I did,” he told him. To make different choices. Rickey mourned for his lost childhood. The two boys enjoyed talking with each other. Rickey confided in Lafeyette that he thought about dying. “I wonder how people feel to die,” he said to his friend. “Like one minute you’re alive, one minute you’re asleep. I’m scared to go to sleep sometime, thinking I might die sometime.”