There Are No Children Here (31 page)

Christine also never heard from the Chicago Housing Authority, on whose property the killing took place. The least they could have done, she thought, was to visit her and offer her condolences. But the CHA didn’t learn of Craig’s death until weeks later. The ATF never called them, either. Even when CHA officials tried to inquire about it, they could learn nothing.

Shortly after the shooting, a police neighborhood relations officer did visit with community leaders, but more to quash rumors—including one that Craig had been shot while handcuffed. Neighbors and friends who now worried about the safety of their own children were afraid to talk about the shooting. Cregier’s principal, Ray Gerlik, who believed that “Craig was done wrong,” urged Craig’s friends who had been with him the night of the killing to go to the police, but he had trouble convincing them. They were afraid that they themselves might become the subject of an investigation.

“People are scared,” said one friend, a student at Cregier. “Who wouldn’t be? This is the FBI [sic]. They’d find out where you live. They’d get you before you even testify.”

Neighbors recalled the Soto brothers’ incident of twenty years earlier with a kind of wistfulness. It was not that they wanted the horrible bloodshed. Nor was it that they wanted to rise up in arms against the police again. It was just that they ached for a time when the community had a collective conscience, when neighbors trusted one another and had enough confidence in their own powers of persuasion to demand a better and more peaceful life. Everyone now seemed timid and afraid. Their whispers damning the police and the ATF fluttered weightlessly like leaves in the wind.

The community itself turned inward, sorry for Craig’s family, but worried about their own well-being. The major newspapers ignored the incident. The police and the ATF simply refused to discuss it, as if by remaining mute they would somehow make people forget. Christine Davis considered filing a civil suit.

The preacher’s voice reverberated among the mourners, but his protestations seemed empty at such a tragic occasion. “Craig was no gang member,” he bellowed, his words barely reaching the mourners standing in the back. “There is drugs, lots of dope out there, but Craig would have none of that. Oh, he had a temper among friends, but he knew enough to walk away from trouble.” His voice reached a crescendo; it was the only moment of untamed anger, “
HE KNEW ENOUGH TO WALK AWAY FROM TROUBLE
,” he repeated. “Amen,” some muttered to themselves. “Amen.”

The minister continued. “But he knew his time had come. He was going home. He was going home.” His gravelly, evangelical voice called for some response, some cries of sorrow and pain, some recognition of the tragedy, but the room, except for a bawling baby, remained hushed. You could hear people folding the mimeographed programs and shifting in their chairs, and through the thin walls the cries of a grieving woman in the room next door.

Lafeyette didn’t stay for the service. When he had first arrived and viewed Craig’s body, he pictured the summer evenings spent dancing by the porch, of a laughing and joking Craig spinning records, his body swaying in time to the music. He couldn’t get out of his mind the image of Craig waving to him. Each of those evenings was a time when the present, the here-and-now, had seemed good enough to Lafeyette, one of those rare moments when he wasn’t haunted by the past or worried about the future. Lafeyette couldn’t get those snapshots of memory off his mind. So, early in the service, he neatly folded the funeral program, slipped it into his back pocket, and shuffled out of the chapel into the crowded hallway, where he slumped into an armchair. He bent over in the plush gold chair, his chest pulled down to his knees. His face tightened, his expression became flat and vacant. He was unwilling, perhaps unable, to cry. Only his rust-colored eyes offered any hint of his anguish. Underneath them were two puffy, dark circles. He spoke to no one. He pulled the silence in around him.

Craig’s death, LaJoe believed, broke Lafeyette. From that day on, she said, he started thinking, “I ain’t doing nothing, I could get killed, or if not get killed I might go to jail for something I
didn’t do. I could die any minute, so I ain’t going to be scared of nothing.”

For weeks afterward, LaJoe felt Lafeyette personally carrying the burden of Craig’s death, as if there were something he might have done to help his friend. Lafeyette rarely mentioned Craig. He didn’t want to talk about him. “I don’t want nothing on my mind,” he would say. Memories for Lafeyette became dangerous. He recalled nothing of Bird Leg’s funeral. He couldn’t remember the names of any of the performers at the talent show. He sometimes had trouble recounting what he had done just the day before in school. Shutting out the past was perhaps the only way he could go forward or at least manage the present. Besides, he knew, nothing could bring Craig back.

He fell into a deep depression, collapsing in bed immediately after school and sleeping long hours. And when the outward grief diminished in intensity, his distrust of others built—and his memory failed him more. He soon affected a long, jerky gait in which his upper body leaned forward as if it had been realigned; his eyes locked with the ground as if to block out others around him. He no longer looked thirteen; his bobbing, cocky walk made him look older.

Many weeks after the funeral, in one of the rare moments when Lafeyette talked about Craig, he asserted with a controlled anger that unnerved those around him: “He wasn’t no gangbanger. They lied. If I was Craig’s mama or daddy I would of walked up to that police and shot him in the head the same way he did Craig. I hope the policeman dies.”

Only two days after Craig’s funeral, Lafeyette lost yet another friend, Damien Russell.

Everybody called him Scooter. Scooter lived in the building across the playground from the Riverses. A couple of years older than Lafeyette, Scooter hung out with a different crowd, but Lafeyette knew him and liked him and felt sorry for him, because he’d heard that his mother was hooked on cocaine. Scooter spent a lot of his time on the streets.

Twenty minutes after midnight on March 12, Scooter and four other friends were tooling around in a stolen Oldsmobile. As the black sedan pulled down Wood Street going south from Horner, it passed a police car going in the opposite direction.
The fourteen-year-old driver slumped down in the seat. The officers were suspicious; they made a U-turn and began to follow the car with the five boys. Before they could even give chase, though, the sedan picked up speed. No one is certain how fast it was traveling, though some estimates put it at over sixty miles per hour. It ran a stop light and two traffic lights and then suddenly spun out of control. Like a top, it kept twirling until it careered into a light pole. The car hit the steel pole smack in the middle, just about where the two passenger doors met. No one, it appeared, was wearing a seat belt.

The car’s interior was so mangled that it was impossible to tell where each of the boys had been sitting. The first police officer on the scene had to count the dangling arms to determine the number of passengers in the wreck. By the time the firemen were able to cut them out, two of the boys, including Scooter, were dead of massive internal injuries. Another died later in the hospital. The oldest of the three was fifteen. The driver, who had fled the accident, was later found guilty of three counts of reckless homicide.

When Lafeyette heard the news the next day, he didn’t change expression. He just asked his mother not to talk about Scooter. “Let him rest,” he urged her. “The [death] train done got him and he’s gone. Why you gotta talk about him?”

He told his mother he didn’t want to attend another funeral.

Twenty-two

   
THE MARBLE-SIZE HAIL crashed relentlessly off the sidewalk, the ice bouncing with the vigor of Ping-Pong balls. The children sprinted home from school on this Thursday, March 16, protecting their small heads with worn and tattered textbooks held high. They screamed in amusement and pain as the freezing rain pounded away at them. Pharoah, wearied from his short battle with the weather, straggled through the door and threw himself onto the couch, where, with his wet and dirty high-tops tucked beneath
him, he sat for a moment to catch his breath. Lafeyette followed.

“Take your feet off the couch,” he ordered Pharoah, who covered his mouth, sheepish at his indiscretion.

“Oh,” he muttered, and sat upright.

It had been one week since Craig’s funeral, and Lafeyette still had an edge about him. If he didn’t fall asleep directly after school, he found some activity to busy himself with. Today, as his mother often did when she was upset, he cleaned. Sometimes he would spend an evening rearranging the living room furniture, so that during a year, the couch, chairs, and coffee table might be shuffled about nearly a dozen times.

Lafeyette hung up his jacket on the metal coat rack and then picked up a broom and began sweeping around the plastic receptacle in the kitchen, overflowing with food scraps, mostly cereal, which the children ate at all times of the day. Pharoah, the triplets, and their niece, eight-year-old Tyisha, lazily huddled on the couch to watch Popeye cartoons. With LaJoe out looking for work—she had gone to a local hospital to file a job application, Lafeyette filled in for her. He did so whenever she was away, assuming the role of parent and keeper of the house. At times he seemed like a thirteen-year-old manchild.

“Clean up that table, Timothy!” he shouted as he moved the broom back and forth in brisk strokes. “You don’t clean that up, you ain’t gonna watch any TV.” A crumpled bag and other papers lay scattered on the heavy, wooden coffee table; Timothy, though, moved slowly, as if an invisible force were keeping him away from the table and its mess. He continued to sit on the sofa, his thumb in his mouth, his eyes riveted on Popeye; but he leaned forward, as if that position might make him seem in motion toward the clutter on the table.

Luckily for him, for Lafeyette had begun making threatening thrusts with the broom, Brian’s brother, Larry, who had been staying in the apartment, walked through the door. Lafeyette liked Larry, who was good-natured, high-spirited, and easy to make laugh, but he resented that Larry’s “freeloading” off his family. Larry got two feet into the living room when Lafeyette sighted him.

“Mop the kitchen,” Lafeyette ordered. Larry ignored him and headed for a back room. “You gonna have to do something.
You ain’t living free, punk,” Lafeyette yelled at Larry’s back as the guest disappeared.

“Man, you two, get them toys outta here. Put them in your closet. Come on. Get up.” Tiffany and Tammie were his next targets, and, like Timothy, they tried to disregard their moody brother.

“You heard me. Get them toys outta here!
OUTTA HERE! BEFORE I HIT YOU
.” Both girls started to cry. “
MAN, JUST PICK UP THEM THINGS!
”

Lafeyette turned and, like a ferocious factory foreman, began barking out orders faster than anyone could respond—and making threats if they didn’t.

“Timothy, tell Tyisha to come and throw away that garbage. I’m cutting off that TV until this is clean,
YOU HEAR ME
?
ALL OF YOUS
!
I’M CUTTING OFF THE TV UNTIL THIS IS CLEAN … COMPLETELY
!”

Tyisha was a tomboy who could tussle effectively with both Lafeyette and Pharoah. When she once flexed her arm muscles for Pharoah, she tauntingly teased him, “Boys supposed to have muscles and you don’t have any.” She shuffled into the living room, defiantly challenging her uncle.

“Empty that garbage,” Lafeyette ordered.

“I’ll think about it,” she retorted sassily even as she reluctantly dragged the bulging yellow plastic garbage bag through the living room and out the door.

Pharoah, to escape the wrath of his irritated and still grieving brother, had chosen to sweep the bathrooms, where he could be neither seen nor heard.

“Hurry up, Pharoah. Mop the bathrooms,” Lafeyette hollered down the hallway.

“I’m doing it! I’m doing it!” Pharoah shrieked. “Stop speed-balling.”

Lafeyette marched to the back of the house, kicked open the bathroom door, which Pharoah had thought to shut, and examined the forever dark and dusty floor.