The Corner Read online

  R.C. jumped on Brian, who covered up, laughing, as R.C. wrestled him against the desk. “I mean, no, I mean you nice, R.C., you nice for real. Stop, boy.”

  House laughed nervously. Ella read his mind: “They just need some discipline,” she told him. “You need to be firm.”

  He looked doubtful, but promised to meet them down at the gym in a few minutes. “I seen someone up on Mount Street I know,” he explained. “Got to go see if I can talk sense to him.”

  On the way out, he stopped to watch some of his players bickering, trading insults and punches as they assembled for practice. “You know, I see a little of me in all of you,” he told them. “You don’t have to take the road I took.”

  House could see it wasn’t going anywhere, but he couldn’t help himself: “You won’t find no self-esteem on the corner.”

  Silence.

  “Anyone know what self-esteem is?”

  More silence.

  “No one hearin’ me?”

  R.C. gave back a bored, yawning stretch. “Feeling good about yourself,” he said in a half-mumble. The rest of them stood there mute, staring down at their leather high-tops, unfazed, politely silent only because they wanted to play ball.

  House headed off to Mount Street. Boo, last of the crew to post for this first practice, came running up a minute later. “Where the coach at?” he asked.

  “Gone to get a blast,” answered DeAndre dryly.

  When the team showed up at the high school doors, ready to test the facilities, Rose Davis greeted them in the lobby. Seeing DeAndre in the pack, she singled him out.

  “This one’s mine,” she said, giving him a quick hug.

  DeAndre smiled, embarrassed by the attention. Rose led the way up the stairs, stepped inside to the electrical panel, then threw the bank of switches; one by one, the overhead lights began blinking on until, at last, the perfection of the place was revealed. Glass backboards, solid rims and nets, polished hardwood—the gym was crisp and clean, a sanctuary that received a long moment of genuine reverence from the crew.

  “Gracious,” said Tae, overcome.

  “This shit is right,” shouted R.C., racing across the floor to fire off an imaginary jumper. House walked in behind them, fresh from having taken his NA rap to the Mount Street users. With some confusion, the boys managed to form lines and run layup drills, but it fell apart quickly: Tae, with a 360-spin that couldn’t find the backboard; R.C., with a double clutch that didn’t reach to the rim. And with DeAndre’s turn, the layups were abandoned entirely for three-pointers.

  “We should play,” said R.C., bored with the drill.

  The pick-up game that followed—replete with traded insults and petty arguments—made the layup drill look professional. They weren’t a team, they were a pack. They proved as much to House on the walk back to the rec, when Manny Man spotted a Lexington Terrace rival who had earlier banked Tae. This time, though, the Terrace Boy was alone and about four blocks west of where he should be.

  They fanned out. Manny jumped the school’s fence and moved on the kid from behind, while Tae, DeAndre, and R.C. headed directly toward the target.

  At first the kid stayed put, oblivious. They were still about a hundred feet shy when something—some street-sharpened instinct—made him look up. He jump-started, bolting north toward the expressway, running in Timberlands that for some reason didn’t slow him. The pack took off, baying like wolves, Manny Man getting the best angle as they raced up Stricker. At the end of the block, Manny was just behind, arm outstretched and closing, but the kid wouldn’t break stride. He sprinted through Saratoga without looking; Manny pulled up to check the traffic.

  “See the nigger run with them boots,” said R.C., amazed. “Blew you away, Manny Man.”

  Manny defended himself: he got close. Tae agreed. The boy would’ve been caught if he hadn’t risked getting run over.

  “Fuck with one of us, you fuck with all of us,” said DeAndre, offering up team spirit for the first and only time that afternoon. “One day, he won’t be so lucky.”

  A week later, the new coach sent his regrets to Ella. She lost him not to the corner, but to a job on the night shift at University Hospital, where House joined the cleaning staff. Working full-time and still chasing his Narcotics Anonymous meetings, he couldn’t hope to handle the weekday practices, nor could he post for evening games when he’d be on shift at the hospital.

  Ella understood; a job was a rare thing indeed for someone who had spent years on the corner. She gave House her best wishes and proceeded to press the coaching job on any male acquaintance willing to listen. For a week, she seemed to have convinced Mr. Roland from over on Gilmor Street, and Mr. Roland knew the game well; he had coached rec teams in the past and for years had been a referee in the citywide Cloverdale tournament. Better still, the man had a fifteen-year-old son in the eighth grade at Harlem Park who had something of a jump shot.

  “You’re just what they need,” Ella assured him.

  He lasted exactly one afternoon, retiring in disgust after a Tuesday practice in which his son, playing a clean low-post, was savagely tripped, elbowed, and ultimately punched across the court by the entire C.M.B. crew. When Mr. Roland tried to put his players on the bleachers and deliver a lecture, he got back only insolence.

  “You full of shit,” Boo told him.

  So in the end they were orphaned, freed from the burden of adult supervision to become the great uncoached horde of the west side rec leagues, fifteen-and sixteen-year-old Huns dragging their barbarian brand of roundball across the urban steppes and now, into the great cathedral at Bentalou. Their uniforms—basic unadorned black—said as much. Not black with white trim, or black and gold, but cotton shorts and tank tops marked only by a pair of two-inch-high, iron-on, already-starting-to-peel numerals.

  The uniforms were Ella’s personal contribution; with the rec budget tight, she went down to Mt. Clare with her own money, laying out more than two hundred dollars for ten sets of tank tops and trunks. For Ella, it was an enormous sum, but the uniforms gave permanence to the idea of a basketball team. The players gathered around her in the rec center office to get their mediums and extra larges, then rushed home to find a steam iron to attach the tiny numerals to the backs of the jerseys. The effect was immediate: They not only began wearing the uniforms to the weekday practices, but around the neighborhood as well, parading along Fayette with oversized jerseys over sweatshirts and flannels. Ella’s uniforms became ritual objects, even among the vial-slinging caste.

  “When you all play?” the older heads would ask.

  “Ella got us a game with Bentalou.”

  “You playin’ Bentalou?”

  “We at Bentalou Friday next.”

  Even now, with the squad losing badly on the Bentalou court, there is something hard and prideful in the black uniforms, something akin to a pirate ship appearing off the starboard bow and running the Jolly Roger up the mizzen. As always, the Bentalou players are moving without the ball, passing, running piks and weaves and generally controlling the game in their satin-white jerseys, custom-lettered with red and blue trim. By contrast, the M.L.K. crew is running pickup ball and getting pounded. Yet the vacant black of their jerseys somehow speaks louder than their game. To the regulars in the Bentalou gym, Ella’s team is an unknown quantity, anonymous and vaguely lethal. They also trail by twenty at the half.

  “We were shit,” mutters Dewayne, wounded by the score.

  “You were shit,” says Manny Man, correcting him. “I ain’t played but a minute.”

  “You were shit for that minute,” R.C. assures him.

  “C’mon, Tae,” pleads Manny Man, “put me in.”

  Tae figures there isn’t anything wrong with the C.M.B. game that Manny can fix. He goes with the lineup that started the game. R.C. rolls his eyes at the mention of Brooks.

  “Take Brooks out,” he says bluntly. Brooks scowls, R.C. shoves him out of the team huddle, but Tae stays with his starters. The third quarter p
roves no different, with Bentalou substituting for their starters and still managing a twenty-six-point lead. On defense, R.C. holds his man to a single bucket and at the same time controls the boards; on offense, he’s trapped and useless in the low post, forever dependent on an attack in which passing is anathema. In the last quarter, when Brooks launches another graceless, out-of-range jumper, R.C. finally explodes. Tae orders Brooks to the bench, and Brooks responds by ripping off his jersey and tossing it onto the court.

  “Y’all can suck my dick.”

  Herman Jones, doubling as referee, calls the technical.

  “Brooks,” yells R.C. “Get off the damn court.”

  The smaller boy turns to confront his tormentor, his face bent into an ugly snarl, his eyes at the verge of tears. R.C. shoves him toward the bench.

  “Motherfucker,” shouts Brooks.

  Double technical, and the Bentalou guard hits both foul shots to end the quarter. Brooks leaves the gym and the game lurches forward, with the team actually showing small flashes of poise at the end. Linwood, stoic amid the wreckage, has been cherry-picking on the offensive boards, putting up a quiet eighteen points from inside the paint. Tae manages to pick off two cross-court passes, turning them into layups. Even R.C. endures long enough to gather in a no-look dish-off from Dewayne and power up for a three-point play. In a last-minute flurry of competence, they lose by only fourteen.

  R.C. keeps his own box score in his head, tallying it all up as if there’s some posterity attached to a nonleague city rec game.

  “I had seven,” he calculates, sliding out of the gymnasium doors. “Four assists and ten rebounds. Three for five from the field and I hit my only foul shot.”

  For some, the game is nothing more than an evening’s entertainment. But for Richard Carter, it’s more than that; for him, basketball is life itself. And in her own corner of the gym, Ella, too, manages to see more in this event than a badly played basketball game.

  Never mind the need for a coach. Never mind the score. Never mind that Brooks is scowling somewhere outside the Bentalou gym, gripping an empty soda bottle, hoping for the chance to toss it at R.C.’ s head. All in all, she counts tonight a success. Her rec center now has a plan for the older boys.

  For the younger children, too, she has made some progress in the last month, notably in the creation of an organized arts and crafts program with none other than George Epps at the helm.

  Blue’s involvement was a surprising turn of events, having as much to do with his state of mind as with Ella’s constant appeals. At the end of January, Blue simply manifested himself on the rec center doorstep, looking sheepish and ill at ease, swaying a bit on the back of his heels, but not over-the-top blasted either.

  Ella sensed the trepidation and hustled him inside quickly. She pulled out the finger paints and the construction paper and everything else in the arts and crafts corner. Blue scanned the inventory and Ella gave the idea her strongest sell, but she could tell he was still on the fence.

  “They love this,” she assured him. “They love art.”

  “Yeah, well, this is good. This is good,” Blue offered. “You know, we’ll see how it goes.”

  “You’ll be great, Blue.”

  “I don’t know, Ella. It’s been, you know, it’s been a while for me and … well, you know, there’s the thing …”

  But Ella wasn’t hearing it. Blue had crossed the threshold; he was inside the rec center, the only place in the neighborhood where Ella’s word is the last one. Slowly, methodically, she brought him around.

  “Okay, Ella. We’ll give it a try, you know, see how it goes. So, ah, when … when would be best to …”

  Ella didn’t hesitate: “Why not today.”

  “Today?”

  Blue was caught. He came back that afternoon, scratching his beard nervously as Ella passed out drawing paper and crayons to the little ones.

  “Today,” she told them, “is going to be different because today we’re going to have an art class with a real artist. Mr. Blue paints and draws and he lives in your neighborhood.”

  Blue edged forward, tentative.

  “Okay. Okay then,” he said, looking down at crayon works-in-progress.

  “That’s very good. That’s very nice.”

  He dropped his satchel, removed his Army coat, and managed one deep breath before launching himself. “Okay,” he said again, sitting at the center table, using one of the small-kid chairs. “Okay, who knows what art is?”

  Charday raised her hand. “A painting,” she said.

  “Uh huh. A painting is art.”

  “A drawing,” said Umeka.

  “Uh huh, right,” said Blue. “But art can be a lot of things, can’t it? It can be a sculpture, or a song, or a poem, or just about anything, really. Art can really be whatever you want it to be.”

  Ella heard it all from the back office, delighted. Awkward at first, Blue grew more comfortable with every sentence, though there was a vagueness hanging on him, a hesitance born of drug corner rhythms. Twice, Ella had to get up to quiet the older boys who were hanging in the front of the rec. But each time, as she turned back toward her office, she saw the faces of the littlest ones, captivated by the presence of George Epps.

  “What’s that?” asked Blue, looking over Michael’s drawing.

  “That’s the Hulk,” the boy told him. “He killing somebody.”

  “Huh,” said Blue. “Well, that’s art, too.”

  That was the beginning of professional art instruction at the rec center. The end came a week and a half later, when George Epps put Rita Hale out of the shooting gallery only to be arrested and charged with burglarizing his own house.

  Still, Ella regarded that as only a modest setback. Blue would come home soon enough, she reasoned, and then his good work as an art teacher would surely resume. Until then, Marzell Myers would keep the weekly sessions going.

  With the rec center, Ella had learned to measure progress in halfway-there increments, to look for partial victories in any battle. Stable volunteers, involved parents, a sufficient operating budget—these things were the suburban ideal, the raw materials for well-tended childhoods in places other than Fayette Street. For the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center, there was no reservoir of commitment from the surrounding community, nothing save for the strays, like Blue or House, who might stumble off a corner and into the lives of Ella’s children. And Ella, who knew this, learned to credit any stray willing to walk through the rec doors.

  A few days after the Bentalou game, Ella is dessed in black yet again for a neighbor’s son, a man dead from the virus after years on the corner. She leaves the services at Brown’s on Baltimore Street in the company of two other men she has made part of her life. The first, Ike Motley, sings a hymn at many of the Fayette Street rites and Ella knows him well. Last month, Ike was singing for Linda Taylor, the next-door neighbor to the McCullough family on Vine Street, laid out at Brown’s after a long fight with the Bug. Today, he sang for Edward Hicks, a casualty at forty-seven. Next week, he’ll be back for some other corner soldier with whom he shared a childhood. Like Ella, Ike has become a fixture at funerals, his hymn a set piece in West Baltimore’s accelerating cycle of grief.

  “That was a beautiful song today,” she tells him at the chapel door.

  “Thank you, Ella,” Ike says quietly, turning away on the steps of the funeral home. “You take care now.”

  “You, too.”

  Her second escort, a lanky, dark-skinned young man in a leather coat, nods an awkward good-bye to Ike, then follows Ella down Baltimore Street to Monroe.

  “Still want me to come to that dance?” he asks.

  “We’d love to have you, Ricky,” she assures him. “We need some chaperones.”

  Ricky Cunningham is another man on the fence, caught halfway between community and corner. His sister, Gale, is on Monroe Street touting. He’s living down near the projects, dabbling with it, disgusted at his inability to stop. A year ago, he had
a good job cutting meat down at Lexington Market, but lost it after he took a charge behind this nonsense. For Ricky, Ella is the promise of new things; he looks at her and follows her from the funeral in a way reminiscent of adolescent love.

  “I be there, Ella. Most definitely, I be there.”

  They turn the corner together and look up Monroe. Ricky seems to stiffen suddenly, unnerved by the site of clustered police cars blocking the intersection with Fayette Street.

  “Somethin’ up,” he says.

  A crowd is packed onto three corners; the fourth is empty, ribbon-wrapped in yellow police-line tape.

  As the two make their way up from Baltimore Street, the scene slowly unfolds: the blood pool on the sidewalk near the liquor store; the detectives leaning against a radio car, arms crossed; the police lab technician, crouching low to the pavement, snapping off camera shoots. And the crowd—the complete inventory of the neighborhood corners from Monroe to Gilmor—all of them there to see the show. From teenaged slingers to dying touts, they mingle as if it were some hellish cocktail party.

  In front of the the carryout at Fayette, Ricky pulls away from Ella and huddles for a moment with his sister and Smitty, her boyfriend.

  “Bryan,” he says, coming back to Ella.

  She can’t place the name.

  “Tall Bryan,” says Ricky, holding his hand a few inches above his own forehead. “Bryan who’s always getting shot. He was burnin’ people, stickin’ people up and all …”

  Ella shakes her head sadly at information for which she has no real use. “It makes no sense,” she offers.

  “You know, Bryan who …”

  Ricky pauses, sees the vague expression on Ella’s face, then shuts down, intuiting, perhaps, some unspoken mark against him for sharing in the corner’s secrets. Bryan’s name, why Bryan got shot—all of it is guilty knowledge of a kind, evidence that Ricky pretends to one world while living in another.

  “Well,” she says, “I guess I’ll see you on Friday then.”

  Ricky nods, pausing halfway across the street. “Friday,” he repeats, smiling. “I be there.”

  If not House, then Blue. If not Blue, then Ricky. If not Ricky, then maybe R.C.’ s older brother, who made some noises the other day about maybe coaching basketball. Ella believes in her strays, waits on them. She watches Ricky drift away, then crosses to the other side of Fayette, where one of the detectives is shouting at June Bey McCullough for stumbling through the crime scene unawares.