Happy Baby

Also by Stephen Elliott

Novels
What It Means to Love You
A Life Without Consequences
Jones Inn

Non-Fiction
Politically Inspired
(Editor)
Stumbling and Raging
(Editor)

IT’S A HALF-EMPTY early morning flight from Oakland into Midway and the sun is coming up, lighting the plane like the inside of an eyelid. The stewardess asks in a whisper if I would like another coffee and I say OK and she sets it on the tray with a white napkin and a small bag of cheese-flavored pretzels, which I stuff in the pouch with the others. I reach over my head and turn the light off. The plane is glowing, there’s so much sun outside. I’m in the back and I have all three seats. I haven’t been in Chicago in six years and I’ve only been on a plane three times in my life. I don’t like to fly.

There’s a giant sound like a bird has been sucked into one of the jets and the seatbelt light flashes on. I grip the armrests as the plane shakes violently twice then continues its course. The pilot doesn’t say anything over the speakers and most of the passengers stay asleep. I turn and see the stewardess in the dark back cabin, sitting in a triangle of light, on a platform against a series of metal cases, reading a magazine, the belt across her lap unfastened. I have blisters on both hands where my girlfriend, Ambellina, burned me with a cigarette when I told her I was going to Chicago for the weekend. I brought just a small bag with me, a change of clothes, a notebook, and an alarm clock. I’m traveling light.

Chicago has changed. Midway is a big airport now and there’s a train that rides all the way to downtown. Hallways as long as boulevards lead to a food court offering soaked beef sandwiches and Vienna hot dogs. The new Mayor Daley welcomes me home, his face plastered across a billboard in front of the train station. I want to climb the scaffolding and kiss him and tell him I’m glad to be back here, even for just a little while. There’s a look in the mayor’s eyes, both knowing and sinister. Chicagoans prefer their politicians crooked and I can understand why. Whatever he has to do, he looks like the guy for the job.

At the Loyola train stop I board the Devon bus and pass Clark Street, where the diners are still painted like Indian casinos, tomahawks and dollar signs over plates full of fried eggs and chili fries. The bus passes Carrie’s, which I didn’t expect to still be there but it is, an Irish bar in the middle of a Muslim neighborhood. Then Western Avenue, Hobby Models now a luggage store, the Nortown theater replaced with a Pakistani assembly hall. Little India, traffic pauses. I lay my head against the glass, and the slow rocking of the bus nearly puts me to sleep. Shirnee bob in pans full of syrup in the windows. I get off the bus to walk.

Almost immediately the strap of my bag whips tight against my neck. “Don’t I know you, motherfucker?” I turn to face a man six-and-a-half feet tall with enormous sloping shoulders, his head like an anvil with a bald stripe running down the center of it, a necklace of tattoos partially obscured by the collar of his denim jacket. His clothes are torn and his face smeared in acne and weeping sores.

“I don’t think so.”

“Give me a dollar.”

We stand for a second. His nose is like a bull’s and pulses while he breathes. His lips peel back to reveal cracked brown teeth and spangled gums. He balls his fists and releases a low growl. The foot traffic continues around us as if nothing is happening. This is where I grew up.

“I’m just kidding,” he says, his cracked lips retreating into a smile. “You don’t know me, man. Don’t look so scared.”

And he turns and walks away, the dirty frays on the bottom of his jeans brushing the sidewalk.

After California Avenue the bright colors are gone and things get quieter. Three Orthodox Jews stand in the rubble parking lot of a synagogue reading to each other and swaying beneath the chipped wooden sign of a star and sickle.

Thillen’s Stadium is still there, where the Little Leaguers play next to the canal. Brown’s Chicken has been replaced by Fried USA. There’s the Lincoln Bridge, which I won’t cross, but on the other side of the bridge is Lincoln Village and Shadows Nightclub, its sign divided into great black wings spread against the facade. I won’t go over there. I can see from where I’m standing that they’ve built new movie theaters and a car wash. The old mall has been scrubbed and painted into a shiny metropolis and it hides the cheap motels on the other side of it. The bridge is city limits. After the bridge you’re not in Chicago anymore.

I knock on apartment No. 10 on the third floor of a three-story rail flat. All of the apartments share a long cement porch and the view is of a closed-down gas station and a deli. One of the apartments has half a dozen pots full of dead plants outside of its door, another a bicycle frame with no wheels. At the end of the porch a man is having a cigarette; he doesn’t look at me when I knock. A woman comes outside, her head wrapped in a scarf and says something to the man but he keeps his back to her and she goes back inside. He pitches his cigarette out to the gutter and takes a pouch of tobacco from his pocket and slowly rolls another one.

“Well,” Maria says when she answers the door, a little at first and then all the way, a baby cradled in her arm. She laughs, then I laugh. God she’s beautiful. She steps out to the porch and the man on the end turns to regard her. The child stretches its arms and squeezes its tiny fists as if waking from a nap. I look past her to see if the apartment is empty. Then her face, which hasn’t changed much, long and oval like an egg. A little older and fatter. Her breasts are larger and she has curves I can make out even beneath her baggy clothes. She’s wearing a striped shirt, two buttons open, and blue jeans. She’s wearing them in a comfortable way, bunched all the way to her ankles and low on her hips, like she doesn’t care how they look. Her dark cheeks are almost pink but she isn’t wearing any makeup. I wasn’t expecting her to have a baby. The baby changes everything.

“You show up at the oddest times,” she says, which makes me smile even more, thinking about the last time, ten years ago, when her boyfriend threw me out of a bar.

“It’s only three o’clock,” I say, wondering how it took so long to get here.

“Very funny, Dumbo. You know what I mean.”

We’re seated at her kitchen table drinking tea. The baby’s name is Kyle. It’s a small one- bedroom apartment, like a studio with doors, but a lot larger than the place she and I used to live in. There’s an enormous box of corn flakes above the fridge, three pans of different sizes dangling over the stove. She has a couch, a small stereo shaped like a jukebox, some toys on the floor, and one entire wall filled with paperback books.

“What happened to your hands?” Maria asks. The blisters are the size of pencil erasers. I had forgotten my burns. I think she would understand if I told her. Ambellina was jealous; she gets that way. I look down at the muscles between my thumbs and index fingers, push my thumbs against my fingers. Ambellina didn’t want me to go but I told her I had to so she pulled my hand toward her, locking my elbow between her knees, pushing my palm into her leg. I said no and she said yes, pressing the cigarette into the back of my wrist, making a sound like the sizzle of an opium pipe. I screamed. “Now the other one,” she said.

“Bacon grease,” I tell Maria. “It’s nothing.”

“Both hands?”

“I know.”

“I don’t know,” she says, patting her child. She lives here alone. There’s no evidence of anyone else in this apartment, a small dish of baby food perched on the edge of the sink. The runners are tan and the paint is cracked, revealing an older layer of blue paint beneath it.