There Are No Children Here (8 page)

Five

   
BIRD LEG LOVED DOGS. And for that reason, Lafeyette loved Bird Leg. His real name was Calvin Robinson, and though he was three years older than Lafeyette, he let the younger boy tag along with him, in part because he had few friends. The older boys made fun of his obsession with dogs; the younger ones seemed to understand it.

Bird Leg and Lafeyette hunted for German shepherds, mutts, and even pit bulls in the small, fenced-in back yards of the Hispanic and white neighborhoods just north of the housing project.
Ordinarily, the dogs growled and fought with Lafeyette and other strangers, but Bird Leg could communicate with them in ways the other children found uncanny. As he climbed into the back yards, he talked to them, consoled them, cajoled them, lured them, until they sidled up to him, drooling on their newfound friend. Then he unchained them, lifted them over the yard fence, and brought them home.

“The dogs would always come with him,” recalls one boy, with a combination of amazement and respect. “He had more dogs than he did friends.”

With Lafeyette’s assistance, Bird Leg kept his assortment of canines—some stolen, some strays, some raised from birth—in an abandoned garage catty-corner from Lafeyette’s building. Bird Leg often got down on his hands and knees to speak to his companions. Sometimes he kissed them on their sloppy chops, a practice the other children shook their heads at in disbelief. A few nights a week, Bird Leg scrounged through the trash bins behind the nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken, and collected half-finished meals to feed his pets. Lafeyette often helped.

Bird Leg occasionally spent the night with his animals in the worn, leaning garage, huddling among them for warmth. On one unusually cold fall night, Bird Leg, only twelve at the time, built a fire by the garage door, fueling it with cardboard and rags. The heat, he hoped, would warm his shivering friends. Instead, the old wooden building, without much coaxing, quickly caught fire and burned to the ground. The police brought Bird Leg to his mother, who, though angry, couldn’t help laughing at her son’s misguided intentions. It was the first of what were to be many brushes with the law.

As Bird Leg got older, he became involved with the Vice Lords, and he and Lafeyette grew apart. Lafeyette was too young and too wary to join the gangs, but he cherished all that Bird Leg had taught him about dogs. And he missed him.

Bird Leg, his mother suspects, sought protection from the gang in the same way he sought love from his dogs. Jimmie Lee, said his mother, had become like a big brother, though Bird Leg didn’t run drugs for him. In fact, many of Lee’s older workers didn’t even know Bird Leg. Also, a close relative was a Vice Lord, which meant that Bird Leg, who lived on the western edge of Horner, Disciples’ territory, frequently had to withstand
a beating just to enter his building. Uncles’ and cousins’ associations with a particular gang can mark children too young to have chosen their own affiliation.

As a teenager, Bird Leg became increasingly reckless and hard-headed. By the age of fourteen, he had for all intents and purposes dropped out of school. Friends say he would sometimes borrow a shotgun from a friend and randomly shoot at Disciples, a practice not uncommon among the very young gang members. He also started raising his pit bulls to fight. His favorite was a light brown muscular terrier named Red. “I was scared of that dog,” Alberta Robinson said later. “I once went to hit Bird Leg for something he did and that dog just about bit me.” The police eventually confiscated the starving and scarred terrier; Bird Leg had used it to threaten an officer.

Bird Leg had always lived on the edge and, indeed, earned his nickname when at the age of four he chased a tennis ball into a busy street and was struck by a speeding, drunk driver. The doctors had to insert pins in one knee and ankle. When the chest-high cast came off after many weeks, his leg was so thin and fragile-looking that his grandmother started calling him Bird Leg.

In the summer of 1986, while shooting dice with some friends, he was approached by a man with a shotgun demanding his money, and Bird Leg, in his youthful defiance, ran. The man emptied a cartridge of buckshot into Bird Leg’s shoulder. That incident, added to the intensifying war between the gangs, caused his mother to move her family into an apartment on the city’s far north side. But, as is often the case when families move, Bird Leg and his brothers kept returning to Horner to visit friends.

Sometimes at Henry Horner you can almost smell the arrival of death. It is the odor of foot-deep pools of water that, formed from draining fire hydrants, become fetid in the summer sun. It is the stink of urine puddles in the stairwell corners and of soiled diapers dumped in the grass. It is the stench of a maggot-infested cat carcass lying in a vacant apartment and the rotting food in the overturned trash bins. It is, in short, the collected scents of summer.

In mid-August of the summer of 1987, the Vice Lords and
their rivals reached a temporary truce. Because of the season’s violence, the police had increased their presence at Horner. The gangs knew that more police would only disrupt their drug transactions, so they agreed among themselves to stop, in their own word, “clowning.” But for young members like Bird Leg, such business acumen seemed at odds with what had become almost instinctual for young gang members: Vice Lords got along with neither Gangster Stones nor Disciples. Truce or no truce.

On a Thursday night late in August, a rival gang member shot Bird Leg in the arm with buckshot. After being treated at the hospital, he joked with his older brother and cousin that if he were to die he wanted to be buried in his white jogging suit. They laughed and told him they would oblige him.

The next evening, August 21, Bird Leg, despite his mother’s protestations, left his north side apartment to visit friends at Horner. As he sat in the late day’s heat and watched two friends play basketball, a group of young Disciples started taunting him, tossing bricks and bottles at his feet. His thirteen-year-old sister, who also was at Horner visiting friends, pleaded with Bird Leg to come inside the building to their cousins’ apartment. “Get your ass upstairs,” Bird Leg ordered her. “I’m gonna kill some of these punks today or they’re gonna kill me.” It was tough talk for a fifteen-year-old; his sister ran inside, crying. By the time she climbed the six floors to her cousins’ apartment, a single pistol shot had echoed from below.

Twenty-four-year-old Willie Elliott had stepped from between two parked cars and aimed a pistol at Bird Leg. Only two feet away, the boy froze like a deer caught in the glare of a car’s headlights. The bullet tore through Bird Leg’s chest. He clutched his wound and ran through the breezeway of one high-rise. “Man, I’ve been shot!” he hollered in disbelief. He appeared to be heading for the safety of a busy street. He didn’t make it. The bullet, which had hit him at point-blank range, entered his chest and spiraled through his body like an out-of-control drill, lacerating his heart, lungs, spleen, and stomach. Bird Leg, struggling to breathe, collapsed beneath an old cottonwood, where, cooled by its shade, he died.

Word of death spreads fast in Henry Horner. Sometimes the killing happens late at night when most people are asleep.
Then, since few witnesses are around, the incident can take on mythic proportions. A stabbing becomes a butchering. A shooting becomes an execution. Sometimes it can take days for the correct name of the victim to surface. But a daytime killing here draws a crowd, and as Bird Leg lay against the tree, a young boy mounted his bike to deliver the news.

From a friend’s second-floor window, Lafeyette heard the boy’s breathless rendering of the fight, but he decided not to join the other children who ran across Damen Avenue to the crime scene. “I just didn’t want to go,” he said later. He had already seen enough.

James, however, more adventurous, sprinted across Damen and snaked through the crowd that had already gathered around Bird Leg. He later told Lafeyette what he saw. On the grass, only ten feet from a small playground filled with young children, lay Bird Leg, his white jogging suit stained with blood. Wrapped around one of his closed fists was his only weapon, his belt.

“I was just shocked,” James told Lafeyette. “The eyes just rolled to the back of his head and he was gone.”

Within minutes after Bird Leg died, Jimmie Lee stepped through the crowd. It was, said one, like Moses parting the waters. People stepped back to let him through. He looked down at Bird Leg’s limp body, said nothing, and then walked back through the crowd, where he assembled a band of thirty teenagers. With Lee at their flank, the young militia marched west, looking for revenge. James and the rest of the crowd scattered.

Charlie Toussas, the plainclothes officer who knew Lee well, confronted Lee and his army. “Jimmie, this isn’t a good time for this.” Lee, according to Toussas, silently turned to his followers, lifted his hand, and pointed to the other side of Damen; and the contingent of Vice Lords, as if manipulated by puppeteers, turned and marched back to their own turf. In the weeks to come, Disciples were the targets of gunfire.

When someone at Henry Horner is killed, mimeographed sheets usually go up in the buildings’ hallways, giving details of the funeral. Bird Leg’s family, though, avoided this procedure. Having heard that the Disciples planned to storm the funeral home and turn over the casket, they didn’t want to publicize the
funeral’s location. They not only moved it from a nearby mortuary to a distant south side church, they also called the police, who assigned two plainclothesmen to sit through the service and, in effect, keep watch over the dead.

Bird Leg’s swollen face made him look twice his age. But the new red-trimmed white jogging suit, which his mother had bought to honor his wishes, and a small gold friendship pin bearing his initials were reminders that Bird Leg had been only fifteen.

Lafeyette, Pharoah, and James were the first to file up to the open casket, where Lafeyette ran his fingers along Bird Leg’s jogging suit. At first hesitantly and then with great affection, he caressed the boy’s puffy face. James also gently touched the body, pulling back before his fingers reached his friend’s rounded cheeks. Pharoah, barely tall enough to see into the casket, stood on tiptoe but kept his hands to his side. He had hardly known Bird Leg; he was here to be with his big brother.

“It looks like he’s breathing,” James whispered to Lafeyette, desperately wanting to be told he was wrong.

“He ain’t breathing,” Lafeyette assured him.

James glanced at Bird Leg again and, to no one in particular, muttered, “I’m figuring to cry.” He wiped the tears from his face with the back of his hand.

Except for its plush red-cushioned pews, the one-story Zion Grove Baptist church, formerly a barbershop and before that a grocery store, seemed tired and worn. It adjoined an abandoned hamburger stand and faced a vacant lot. Inside, the church was sparsely decorated. A nearly lifesize rendering of
The Last Supper
covered the back wall; an American flag, wrapped around its pole, was draped in clear plastic.

The low ceiling and cinder-block walls did little to discourage the late August heat. The two bright floral arrangements, one at each end of the casket, struggled to retain their beauty through the hour-long service. Friends and relatives and fellow gang members, about 150 in all, shifted uncomfortably in the pews, fanning themselves with the mimeographed programs in a futile attempt to keep from perspiring.

The humidity put everyone on edge. Bird Leg’s sister, in her grief, wailed in a pained, high-pitched voice that echoed
through the small church like a stiff wind through a canyon. “I wanna kiss him. He ain’t dead,
HE AIN’T DEAD
,” she cried. Months later, her protestations would echo in Pharoah’s head; it was the one moment he would vividly recall from the funeral.

The three boys found seats off to the side, positioned so that one of the numerous thin pillars wouldn’t obstruct their view of the lectern. Lafeyette wore faded gray corduroy pants and a shimmery silver-colored nylon jacket; Pharoah wore matching navy blue corduroy pants and sweatshirt. Both outfits were in sharp contrast to the tight suits and carefully cocked fedoras of most of the men. James himself looked like a young man, in his own purple high-waisted suit and black fedora. Three of Bird Leg’s relatives, including a brother, wore T-shirts that read
I
BIRD LEG
. Jimmie Lee, dressed in a charcoal-black sport coat, sat unobtrusively in the crowd. He had been asked to be a pallbearer.