Happy Baby by Stephen Elliott Page B

doesn’t anymore. That was a long time ago.” I shake my head. “Really, Petey, leave Maria alone.”
    Petey makes a movement that resembles a shrug of the shoulders. “I love her,” he says, as if it were the most simple thing in the world and the smell of the hospital had nothing to do with it, as if anybody who walks away from love is a fool, and I know as soon as he gets out of here he’ll be standing outside her window again, hoping for a breeze carrying some of Maria’s scent. Maria smells like cheap lotion from a Jergens bottle, peaches, which is what her skin feels like where there aren’t scars. And Joe will kill Petey, because that’s the kind of guy Joe is.
    I came home one day to an empty efficiency and I knew Maria was gone for good. She’d been going out more and more, leaving the apartment in a short skirt with no underwear, the wind biting at her blue-veined legs. Heading down to the gas station, getting in cars. She’d come home with bruises, black eyes, a bloody nose.
    “Don’t go out, Maria.”
    “What do you know? Stop me.” What she was really saying was, Make it stop.
    I made my own trips, to the Wasteland, but everything’s different. I was nineteen years old and knew less than I do now. I’d squeeze into Maria’s clothes when she was gone, take the stairs in stockings, walk the streets in her underwear, mascara around my eyes. The girls in front of the bookstore ignored me. The gangsters near Howard just laughed. “Hey bitch, you want to suck my dick?” I’d run from them. Sometimes I’d stop. Sometimes they’d catch me. I didn’t know what I wanted and Maria wouldn’t stay home. I cried when she showed up with hash marks cut across her chest. They were over her breasts and belly, thin diagonal slices. Red, with bits of blood on the edges. Her body looked like it had been hog-tied in razor wire.
    “Who did this?”
    “I wanted it.”
    We’d look at each other sometimes, both of us beat up, neither of us able to protect the other one. We’d stare at each other with as much space as the small mattress would allow. Two years ago she called me at work. She was back in the neighborhood. She wanted me to meet her new boyfriend. She wanted to know what I thought.
    We sat in the back room of a bar on a cobbled street by Loyola University, the kind of place where old men order beer by the pitcher. Maria looked fit and healthy for the first time in her life. She wore skintight leggings and a shirt that stopped at her waist. She kept her eyes low. The guy she was with had muscles coming out of his neck and shoulders like a car grille. She went to hug me and he grabbed her by the hair. She lightly patted my shoulder with one hand instead. I decided to ignore it. We had two beers and spoke in generalities about things like the cement border the alderman erected in the middle of Howard Street. When I asked Maria where she had been she said, “Around.” Joe yanked her chair over to his and she looked at her hands. He spoke for her.
    “She was in Wisconsin, working in the Oshkosh factory in Apple. OK. We live behind the Heartland.” He glared at me. He said he worked out six days a week and flexed his arms to show me that he meant it. He said he knew how to kick-box. “Theo, or whatever your name is,” he said. “Maria had a hard childhood. Everybody has a hard childhood. I had a hard childhood. I used to get beat up a lot, believe it or not.” He talked like he had been sucking gas with pebbles in his mouth. “You know what I did to the people that used to beat me up when I was a kid? I found them later and I put them in the hospital. Every last one of them.”
    I sipped my beer and stared up at the bar TV. I wondered why Maria wanted me to meet him. Did she want me to save her? Or did he put her up to it? On the TV the Bulls were playing the Pistons. It was the playoffs.
    The next day Maria called. I had to take the call at my boss’s desk. I didn’t have my own desk. “He