The Corner Read online

  He catches a movement in the cell across the way. Gary thinks he sees the glint from a gold ring slicing through the air, smashing down into a sleeping form. He hears a whimper, then the ripping of fabric and flashes of white skin. And then, a shattering of sound, with the caged animal cursing over a piercing endless scream that banks off the bars and echoes down the tier. Something is tossed from the cell; Gary squints in the darkness until his eyes make out what looks like the bloody stub of a broken fluorescent tube.

  The guards finally come and take the kid away. Gary closes his eyes, praying into that void, petitioning every power in the universe to take him home. No more dope, no more capers.

  For all that night and the next, he’s singing the redemption song, making plans for the better life to come, promising to wash the sin from his hands. He’s still talking like that on the day after, when the bail money is right and he’s gliding out from under the razor wire on Eager Street.

  He’s back on Vine the next day, breathing deeply, feeling good about himself, ignoring the chants of the touts, ennobled by the effort to make good on his oaths. I can do this, he tells himself. I can get it all back.

  His father’s cab comes in off Monroe, rolls down the slope and rides up over the curb to park in front of the neighbor’s house. W. M. gets out, pausing a second from the effort.

  Then he sees his son and lifts a huge hand to chest level for a small wave. Gary blinks, his eyes filling, and father and son search each other for a moment, but neither takes the moment any further. W.M. breaks the stare, then walks by in silence, wearily climbing the steps to the house. Gary watches him, loving him even from the depths of the abyss.

  The front door slams and Gary is alone on the street, wondering whether the jailhouse pills got him through, whether the snake is dead or just waiting. He watches two women get served in front of a vacant garage and feels the vicarious pleasure of the transaction. He’s still unwilling to go up to the corner, but equally unwilling to leave his front steps.

  He sees her first up on Monroe Street, drifting back and forth at the mouth of the alley. Indifferent to her surroundings, the weather, her own physical being—a haunted creature, pinning him down with her eyes alone, drawing him wordlessly toward her. For a moment, he thinks to turn and run, to get into his mother’s kitchen and ask for an egg sandwich. Instead, he walks up that hill pretending he’ll do battle with her, scream at her, tell her how he suffered. But his voice isn’t harsh enough for the task; the words come in sad appeal, not anger.

  “Ronnie, why you do me like that?”

  She snorts derisively, looking away.

  “You had me locked up for nothin’.”

  She ignores him, watching a tout approach a customer near the pay phone.

  “You put me in jail behind nothin’ at all.”

  “Gary, you know there won’t be no case when it comes to court.”

  He says nothing.

  “You miss me, love? I got a welcome home gift.”

  Her hand comes out of a sweatshirt pocket, her fist balled.

  Gary looks at the hand, then up into Ronnie’s eyes. And it’s over without a struggle.

  “Careful,” he says, “I don’t want my mother to see.”

  Late the next morning, he’s down in the basement, same as he ever was, waking slowly at the sound of his name. Ronnie lies on the edge of the mattress beside him.

  “Gary … Gary … Gaaaarrry.”

  His mother is at the top of the landing yelling into the darkness, exasperated. “Gary!”

  He finally stirs. “What time is it?”

  “Gary, I need you to go to the store.”

  Ronnie giggles, and he shushes her down. He gets up and starts to dress, telling Ronnie to get out through the cellar door. She laughs again, then begins pulling herself together.

  “Come over after,” she tells him at the door. “I found some stuff in a garage we can take to the scales.”

  It’s Gary who laughs this time. Ronnie doesn’t know a damn thing about what sells and what doesn’t at United Iron and Metal. It isn’t her game and if that’s all the plan she’s got, then he’s got to start worrying. The last speedball is already wearing thin.

  Gary makes it upstairs to the dining room, into the light, looking worn and lost. His mother gives him one glance and knows, but says nothing because there’s nothing left to say. She goes to the small breakfront, rifling through a stack of chipped plates and saucers until she finds the $10 bill hidden there. She hands it to him, telling him to bring back five pounds of potatoes and two boxes of Hamburger Helper.

  He stands there for a moment, staring at the bill, watching it burn his palm. The price of admission. Gary wonders whether his mother has lost her mind. She can see that he’s ailing. She can’t expect, and yet … He hesitates, his mind taking in the runoff from some rare reservoir of better nature. Something is going on here, something that suddenly seems more important than all the promises he gave no real thought to keeping.

  He pockets the money, sensing that this, at least, is tangible, a real chance to go beyond the silence that stands between them, to justify both the loving mother and the dutiful son. This is a mission, a hero’s journey.

  “Be right back.”

  He’s out the back door and into the alley, but it doesn’t matter which way he goes. It’s nearly noon and the shop is bustling from Monroe to Gilmor; he’s surrounded. He’s going to have to face it, wade through it, and emerge on the other side.

  He heads up the alley toward Monroe Street, the shortest distance to the store. But walking past Blue’s house, he sees Pimp ducking under the busted rear door, looking like he’s flush. Gary wets his lips, pulls the Angel hat up, wipes at his brow. The snake hisses, cursing.

  He makes it to Monroe, stepping out of the alley and into the beehive. Up the street, at Vine, it’s all Spider Bags, and down on Fayette Street, Death Row and the Pink Top vials are honey for another swarm of fiends. Gary watches with practiced eyes as those with short money look for hook-ups, as Fat Curt steers a couple of hungry souls down Vine Street, as Eggy Daddy sings the merits of the Pink Tops.

  Gary rivets his eyes to the ground and pushes one foot, then the other down the pavement toward Pratt Street and the grocery. He’s soon past the liquor store, across Fayette, and heading down the hill. So far so good.

  “Gah-ray.”

  It’s Junie talking. Gary makes the mistake of lifting his head. Dope and coke are flying everywhere: touts taking orders, dealers handing off, other bodies on urgent missions flashing past. It’s in the air. He can smell it, taste it. And Junie’s got that Mike Tyson. The shit’s a bomb.

  Gary’s hand, the one with the death grip around Hamilton’s throat, is coming alive, pulling itself out of his pocket, moving with a will all its own. I could tell her I got robbed. Or just not come home. Hang with Ronnie somewhere. Stay down on Fayette Street, give it a couple of days and she’d forget.

  He looks at Junie’s face. A mask, the eyes dead.

  No. He jams the offending hand deep into his pocket.

  “Ain’t up,” he says, then pushes past, crossing Baltimore Street, gaining speed, past Blue’s son, Dontanyn, the last retailer in the line, before rolling downhill to the market.

  Inside, he gathers the stuff, but dag, the prices are way high. He thinks about cutting the order. Maybe shave off a nickel. Tell her he got mixed up, or just drop the bag in the kitchen while she’s upstairs sleeping. It would be nothing to keep five and find a hookup with some other short money. Get ten, maybe twenty on the hype. That’ll work.

  He’s trapped in the aisle, holding one box of Hamburger Helper, then two, then one again. He looks at the label. The stuff ain’t even good for you, too many chemicals. He stands there for a minute more, until the scales tip and he grabs both boxes and the taters, goes to the register and gives up a bill as crumpled as his spirit.

  The way home is not the hero’s journey. He climbs Monroe Street, package in hand. He drags h
is lonesome ass past the touts, feeling weak. The snake spits out its contempt.

  “What took you so long?” asks his mother.

  He mumbles half an answer.

  “Want to eat?” she asks him, her voice now soft.

  Gary looks at her, sees that she knows. Maybe she knew the whole time. He wants to say something, to bring it home, but the snake seizes the moment instead.

  “No, Ma,” he says, “I got to go out.”

  DeAndre McCullough leans against the oversized concrete flowerpots outside the rec center doors, his demeanor on chill, his face tucked down inside the hood of his sweatshirt. R.C. is perched next to him on the steps, lacing and relacing his new Jordans, listening with growing impatience as DeAndre tells the tale. Boo is against the other flowerpot, half listening, half waiting with a broken fragment of the playground’s crumbling asphalt in his hand, watching for a rat to stick its head out of the discarded easy chair at the end of the alley.

  “You was getting out the hack?”

  “Right on Baltimore Street,” says DeAndre.

  “Sheeeeet,” R.C. says. “We should call a meeting.”

  DeAndre nods agreement.

  “We should send a message,” adds R.C. “Go down there deep.”

  “You see who it was?” asks Boo.

  DeAndre shrugs.

  “But, yo, Black, you was comin’ from the projects,” insists R.C. “You was down the hill where they always be. That’s why they took them shots at you.”

  DeAndre nods agreement. He likes it when anyone calls him Black. He fashioned the street name himself, figuring that any real gangster ought to be able to fashion his own corner legend, rather than leaving such important matters to random chance. His family used to call him Onion, because when he was little his head had that particular shape. DeAndre hated Onion.

  “I’m saying we should go strong,” adds R.C., warming to the idea. “Fuck them project niggers. They ain’t all that.”

  It probably was the Lexington Terrace boys who took a shot at DeAndre on Baltimore Street, and by rights C.M.B. should mount up and march back down there in force. But DeAndre has other things crowding his mind; they all do since they started going off to sling drugs in ones and twos. Hard to raise a posse when the crew is scattered over a half-dozen corners.

  “Must be them,” says Boo, chiming in late. “Or maybe those niggers from Stricker and Ramsay.”

  “Boo, you stupid,” says R.C. “They ain’t gon’ be up on Baltimore Street. And, yo, half of them is white anyway.”

  “So?” asks Boo, wounded. “Least I ain’t stupid like you, R.C. Least I go to school.”

  “I go to school,” R.C. says, then catches himself before the other two dissolve in laughter. “Well, I will go to school soon as my mother gets me into Francis M. Woods.”

  That’s the current theory on Richard Carter’s academic career. If he could only get out of Southwestern and into Francis Woods, then he’d turn it around, maybe get to the tenth grade before reaching the age of majority. It’s a fine theory, and there are appreciable differences between the chaos of the Terrordome, as the local kids call Southwestern, and the controlled anarchy of Francis Woods. But the contrast is relevant only if a student were to attend more than, say, two or three days a semester. R.C. always hits a shopping mall for the back-to-school fashion sales, then shows up looking right for the first day of class. After that, it’s back to the streets.

  As for DeAndre, lately he’s been living in both camps. Since Rose Davis put him back on the rolls last month, he’s been making it down to Francis Woods for little more than half of his classes. He’s also been slinging enough of his Blue Tops on Fairmount to keep money in his pocket. Not as much as he’d like, of course—Tyrone Boice plucked him good when he tried to bring his vials up to Monroe Street—but enough to get by.

  “What you say?” DeAndre asks, changing the subject.

  “Huh,” says Boo.

  “About the thing.”

  “Yeah,” says Boo, throwing the asphalt chunk. Hitting the chair, missing the rat.

  DeAndre waits for more of an answer. When none is forthcoming, he suppresses an almost overwhelming desire to smack Boo upside his head. He’s been trying to give Boo a little piece of his package on consignment, bring on a subcontractor and make a little more than he could make on his own.

  “I’m sayin’ you’d get twenty-five,” DeAndre tells him.

  “Twenty-five dollar?”

  R.C. laughs loudly from the steps. “Boo, goddamn!”

  “No,” says DeAndre. “That’s the split.”

  “Oh yeah,” says Boo, nodding until silence descends on them.

  DeAndre looks over at Boo and waits. Boo is a loyal member of C.M.B., but sometimes talking to him is like banging your head on a wall. DeAndre’s latest partner in the Blue Top venture on Fairmount was Corey, his cousin Nicky’s boyfriend. And while Corey didn’t mess up like so many others, he also wasn’t spending as much time on the corner as DeAndre. So hiring Boo seemed to make sense, assuming simple math was at all within his grasp.

  “How much I get?” Boo asks finally.

  “DAMN, BOY,” shouts R.C. “YOU IGNORANT AS SHIT.”

  “At least I ain’t messin’ up all the time like you do,” says Boo, bitterly. “You always a fuck up.”

  Now DeAndre laughs. It was true enough: R.C. was always messing up the money; he couldn’t sling drugs for two days without getting into some kind of hole.

  “Fuck you, bitch,” mutters R.C.

  DeAndre breaks it down to Boo slowly: I give you forty, you sell out and one-fifty comes back to me and fifty you keep. You sell twice that, you make a hundred dollars. And the Blue Tops, DeAndre assures him, they are the bomb; he’s selling out at five dollars a vial on Fairmount. If Boo wants to try them down at Ramsay and Stricker, they could go for dimes.

  “Okay,” says Boo.

  They sit for a time on the two thin steps below the rec doors, glad for a February day with a little warmth. Distracted by a conversation that amounts to half war council, half marketing meeting, they hardly notice as bodies begin to drift in from Fayette Street, lining up meekly. In scarcely a minute, eighteen men and women are standing hard by the fence, on the edge of the playground, across the vacant lot from Mount Street. All in a row, all waiting patiently.

  From here, too, they can see Collins come north up Vincent from Baltimore Street and park his radio car at the intersection with Fayette.

  “Bitch always hanging ’round Malik’s house,” DeAndre says.

  “Yo, that’s cause Malik be snitching,” says R.C. “Many times as he gets locked up and never goes to jail, I’m telling you that boy be snitching.”

  They watch a tall, lanky fiend walk up the middle of Fayette Street in front of Collins, pulling a new refrigerator balanced on a homemade wagon.

  “Collins ain’t shit,” DeAndre declares. “Last summer, he pulled me up on Gilmor, sayin’ he was gonna kick my ass. If my mother wasn’t there, I’da fucked him up.”

  “Collins always be pickin’ at us,” R.C. complains. “Like we’re the only ones doing shit.”

  “He ain’t as bad as Bob Brown,” says Boo.

  “That’s what I’m saying,” says R.C. “They always be after us like we the gangsters.”

  “Bob Brown come ’round an tell me I can’t even sit on my own steps,” says DeAndre. “That shit ain’t right.”

  Three teenagers—two males and a younger girl—come out of the side alley on Mount and head toward the line of waiting adults. The line seems to straighten in anticipation as one of the young men stands near the end of the line, his right hand tucked inside his jacket. The other escorts the girl to the front of the line, where she begins to hand each fiend a bag.

  Testers.

  From washing machines to widgets, every product needs marketing and promotion, and street drugs are no exception. In every open-air market in the city, samples are offered up early in the day to spread the word that
so-and-so’s shit is truly a bomb. And because a weak tester would be self-defeating, the free samples rarely disappoint. Word that a crew is putting out testers can come minutes or hours—and sometimes even a day or more—in advance of the actual event, and the possibility of free bag or vial can produce a lemming run through a back alley or vacant lot.

  “Family Affair back slingin’ like I don’t know what,” says R.C., watching the line dissolve.

  Just around the corner from the tester hand-off, Collins still sits in his radio car, his view obstructed by the rowhouses on the north side of street. As the fiends skirt out of the alley in twos and threes, the patrolman seems to catch on. He pulls his cruiser into Fayette Street in a hurry, wheeling around the corner at Mount. Too late; the last of them is in full flight.

  “Collins ain’t shit,” DeAndre says again, getting up to leave. R.C. stands up, too, stretching and yawning.

  “Black,” says R.C. “You gonna go to the dance?”

  “When?”

  “Valentine’s. Miss Ella havin’ a sock hop.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Like a dance.”

  “You going?”

  “Oh yeah,” says R.C., proud. “Me and Treecee. You gonna bring Reeka?”

  Tyreeka Freamon has been DeAndre’s girl since the summer. She hasn’t been on Fayette Street long; until last year, she’d been living with her father in East Baltimore—her mother, too busy chasing vials to keep track of her, caught a drug charge that took her to women’s prison in Jessup. Then, when Tyreeka couldn’t get along with her father’s new girlfriend, she landed at her grandmother’s house on Stricker Street. DeAndre likes the newness of Tyreeka, the fact that there isn’t a neighborhood history behind her; and he likes her show of independence, the way she doesn’t always hang with the other girls on the fringe of C.M.B. That’s partly because she’s still going to school on the east side, partly because she likes to hang with the boys, which is good and bad for DeAndre—good because it made it easy to holler at her, bad because there are always others waiting to do the same.