The Corner Read online

  “Boy, don’t trifle with me.”

  “Reeka scared …”

  “DeRodd, shut up.”

  Fran finally emerges from the back room, her hair pulled back tight on her head, her eyes still struggling against the morning sunlight. She gives Tyreeka a grunt of recognition before flopping on the end of the couch and curling into a fetal position. She’s ill this morning, and Tyreeka has spent enough time around Fran to know what that involves.

  “You look tired, Miss Fran.”

  “Hmm.”

  “We leavin’ soon?”

  “’Bout ten.”

  DeRodd comes out from behind the television. “Ma,” he says. “Can I go with you to see Andre?”

  Tyreeka looks over with a silent plea, but Fran is way ahead of her on this one.

  “No.”

  “I want …”

  “I said no.”

  Slowly, Fran lifts her head off the worn sofa cushion and twists around to look out the window. Some of the Death Row crew are already at work on the other side of Mount Street.

  “Miss Fran,” asks Tyreeka. “Who was the Corinthians?”

  Fran gives the girl a look.

  “’Cause the television preacher was talkin’ about them.”

  “Who?”

  “The Corinthians.”

  Fran shakes her head, then pushes herself upright and wanders back into her room. When she returns, she’s wearing her brown winter coat. “If the ride come,” she tells Tyreeka, “tell ’im I be back in a few minutes.”

  She’s gone for longer than that, but the neighborhood hack they’ve hired doesn’t roll up until half past ten, and by that time, Fran is feeling a lot better about the day. In fact, she spends the first half hour on the road gently teasing Tyreeka.

  “Your hair look nice,” she tells her.

  “You like it this way?”

  “How long it take you to do that with the curls?”

  “An hour about.”

  “Girl, when did you get up today?”

  “Seven o’clock.”

  Fran shakes her head. “Reeka in love.”

  Tyreeka shoves Fran’s shoulder gently, laughing with embarassment. Not love, she assures Fran. Like. She likes DeAndre. A lot. But nobody said nothing about loving nobody.

  “Girl,” says Fran, “there ain’t no one alive gets up at seven o’clock to do their hair without being sure enough in love. My son done messed your little mind.”

  Tyreeka giggles at the truth, but holds to the denial for appearance’s sake. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with lookin’ good,” she insists. “I do my hair like this lots of mornings.”

  “Seven o’clock,” Fran says, smirking. “Mmmm mmmm mmmm.”

  They ride south through the suburbs, then down Route 3 toward Prince George’s, where farm fields and woods are punctuated by the occasional subdivision. In the back seat of a rusting Pontiac, Fran grows restive; she has never been comfortable outside the city. No black folk. No action. No corners. Once, when she was in a residential detox program out in Ellicott City, the rumor of a Klan sighting burned through an evening therapy session like wildfire. Scared them half to death.

  But for Tyreeka, the trip to Boys Village is all grand adventure, one of the rare times she can remember going anywhere outside of East or West Baltimore. In Tyreeka Freamon, there is a rare optimism, a naive acquistiveness for things and facts and experiences that thus far has not been dulled by the realities of Fayette Street.

  Her school grades are good; if she keeps at it, she’ll be going to Carver next year, maybe get herself settled in one of the vocational programs. She likes school, or at least, she doesn’t fight it the way so many others do. In class or on the street, she doesn’t temper her curiosity, or front for the usual adolescent insecurities. If she doesn’t know something—and there is a lot the Baltimore public schools have failed to teach her—she won’t pretend otherwise. She’ll ask whomever seems likely to know. Who was Babe Ruth? Was he black or white? Where’s Pearl Harbor? Why is everyone always remembering it? Who’s more important: the governor of Maryland or the mayor of Baltimore? How long would it take to drive to Florida? And when people buy a big, big house, do they have to pay all the money right away or can they pay a little bit at a time while they’re living there?

  These are queries external to the immediacies of the corner world; questions of a kind that the DeAndres and Taes of the neighborhood hesitate to ask, either from a fear of appearing ignorant or from a genuine indifference to the answers. Tyreeka may be unlearned—but raw, innocent hope has kept her mind open and willing.

  “Yeah boy,” DeAndre had declared, scanning her last report card. “My girl is smart. We gonna live in a big house when she gets to makin’ money.”

  But DeAndre is smart, too. Everyone in the neighborhood knows him as one of the sharpest kids on the corner. Yet it always ends there on the corner; time and again, the boy has willed it so, shamelessly telling his school teachers that he won’t do homework, that the quickest way to put a nigger to sleep is to put a book in his hands.

  Somehow, Tyreeka still believes in a future more distant than the next G-pack, and given the first thirteen years of her life, even a shred of faith has to be seen as remarkable. Her mother had been failing her for years now, chasing that blast night after night, slipping out of her life by degrees until Tyreeka was in a new house with her father, his new girlfriend, and his girlfriend’s children. They treated her bad, too; made her feel like she was in the way. After a few months she ran off to her grandmother’s house—just up and left—an eleven-year-old moving her life crosstown on an M.T.A. bus. She made her grandma and aunt both promise not to send her back, and when her father came to get her, she stood up to him, too. You didn’t treat me right, she told him. You let them mess with me and didn’t take my side.

  Her aunt was willing enough; her grandma, too. In time, Tyreeka settled in with her younger cousins. But there was no getting around the day-today absence of a mother and father, no solace for a young girl trying to learn life without the essential audience of her own parents. The report cards came home—passing grades every quarter—and Tyreeka would find herself showing them to people who couldn’t conceal their indifference. Eventually, the graded essays and final exams were no longer given even a cursory display; the report cards were for Tyreeka alone, to be dumped unceremoniously into the bottom dresser drawer.

  On Stricker Street, her loneliness brought her off the stoop and into the street. Like any young girl, she wanted to be loved, or failing that, she wanted at least to be noticed. The neighborhood boys sensed as much; whatever instincts come naturally to the adolescent predator led them soon enough to the empty place in Tyreeka’s world.

  Tae was the first of the C.M.B. boys to chase her. In fact, she knew Tae before she knew DeAndre or Linwood or any of them. Last summer, she messed with Tae in a schoolgirl sort of way; heavy groping but not quite sex, because after all, she was twelve. She liked Dorian, too. And Dewayne. But most of all she liked hanging with boys, sharing the summer nights with them as they prowled the corners and pretended to be gangsters. She was both tomboy and flirt; sharing in their first awkward attempts at slinging vials and joining in for the occasional pack beatings unleashed on stray members of rival crews. She began skipping school—not enough to be held back, though her grades slipped—and spending a day or two a week holed up in some C.M.B. clubhouse, teasing and flirting and generally making herself the center of attention. The boys were fun that way; by comparison, the neighborhood girls her age were boring. That summer was the best time she could remember, but by the fall, when she was DeAndre’s girl, it had come to an end. At first, he told her that he didn’t want her talking to any boys other than C.M.B. boys. Later, when he began to sense the heat coming from Tae and Dewayne, DeAndre amended that: He didn’t want to see her talking with boys, period. She liked that—his jealousy was a special brand of flattery—but at the same time, she missed running the streets. Now, with h
er boyfriend locked up, she was flirting again, not just with the C.M.B. regulars, but with some of the older boys down on Baltimore and Gilmor. DeAndre was her steady and she took that seriously enough, but there wasn’t anything wrong with having fun. Like the dance: Tae made her feel good, but afterward, they had parted company on Fayette and she wandered down to Baltimore Street to play video games with some younger boys.

  But today is special. She would be telling DeAndre something today just by showing up way out there in the country. That alone would let him know how she felt.

  “What if they say it’s family-only for visiting hours?” she asks Fran.

  “Then you my daughter,” says Fran.

  Tyreeka smiles, vaguely proud at the suggestion.

  At the security gate, they’re told that someone will have to call ahead to have DeAndre brought to the administration building. They get out of the hack at the edge of the visitors’ lot, where a staff member takes their information and wanders away, returning twenty minutes later for Fran and Fran alone.

  “Only parents,” he tells Fran. “No siblings.”

  Tyreeka is stricken.

  “Where do they bring him to?” asks Fran.

  “That building there,” the staffer explains. “The van will bring them from the cottages and drop them off inside that gate at that door. You’ll be in that room right there.”

  Fran turns back to Tyreeka. “You stand right here and watch that window.”

  “But can’t I …”

  “I make sure he see you.”

  Fran follows the staffer up to the visitors’ center. Five minutes later, a security van clears the wire-mesh fence surrounding the building. Tyreeka squints her eyes in the midday sun, wishing she’d brought her eyeglasses, watching as a half-dozen young men—all but one of them black—tumble from the rear of the van and tramp up to the metal doors, the lot of them shackled together. All are wearing red-orange sweatsuits issued by juvenile services. All but one of the black kids have their heads covered by the hoods of the sweatshirts. The one who doesn’t has what looks like dreds on top. She takes a guess.

  “Andre! Over here, Andre!”

  She’s waving frantically, but the cold wind is coming down the hill, pushing her words back into her mouth. She wonders whether he’s even among the group, or whether he’s already inside.

  Tyreeka watches as the van driver unshackles the boys and marches them through the metal doors single-file. When they’re gone, she’s left in the winter cold at the edge of the lot, waiting for a moment that won’t come. She buries her neck in her shoulders and digs her hands down into her pants pockets, watching the corner windows of the visitors’ center for any sign of movement. After ten minutes, the driver comes back out and the empty van pulls off.

  The hack has the engine running and the heat on, but Tyreeka stands where Fran said to stand. Her teeth are chattering, her legs are bent slightly at the knees as she bounces on the balls of her feet to bring warmth. After twenty minutes, she thinks she can see a form at the corner window—a shoulder and an arm in the lower pane, and maybe a face just above it.

  She waves, just in case, thinking that if it is DeAndre, and if he can see her now, he knows that she’s standing by him. Seeing her, he has to know that it isn’t just about all the money he fronted—all the movies and clothes and meals and video games—and that if she were like most of the girls around Fayette Street, she wouldn’t be here now that he’s locked up with nothing in his pockets but a toothbrush.

  A gust of wind rolls down the hill and Tyreeka turns her back until it passes. When she turns again, the figure in the window is gone. Fran comes down the hill ten minutes late.

  “He seen you,” she tells Tyreeka.

  “He did?”

  “Mmm hmm. He seen you wave. You couldn’t see him?”

  “Not really.”

  They pile back into the car for the ride home. Fran runs through the conversation for Tyreeka’s benefit. DeAndre doesn’t like Boys Village a little bit.

  “They got him in a cottage with a lot of D.C. boys,” she explains. “And he sayin’ the guards got no play in them.”

  More intimidating is the fact that the Village is the facility of last resort for the state JSA, and DeAndre is bunking with boys who’ve done shootings and murders, boys who’ll be inside until their eighteenth birthday. He’s holding his own, but it’s not Hickey, where a West Baltimore kid can feel at home. At the Village, everyone gets pressed.

  “He was telling me he seen this one boy, not more than ten years old, who’s been trying to make a seven-year-old suck him off. Can you believe that? Ten years old.” Fran snorts, half in wonder, half in disgust. “Andre wants me to bring his ass home,” she adds, with a bemused smile. For the first time in a while, she has the upper hand with her son.

  “When can he get out?”

  “Soon as I hook it up so that he’s staying somewhere with a phone. But I ought to leave his ass down here another week to teach him something.”

  The phone had been a problem from the beginning. A week ago, on the day after his arrest, a JSA van brought DeAndre back up to Baltimore for an initial hearing in the basement of the Mitchell Courthouse, a judicial backwater in which hundreds of teenagers stagnate on wooden benches, waiting for their cases to be shuffled in front of a half-dozen juvenile masters. DeAndre was in the juvenile bullpen for half the day, then waiting on the benches in the rear of a master’s room for the rest of it. The routine calls for pretrial release to parental custody in most instances, but with DeAndre, there was that other cocaine possession charge and the stolen car case. So when his name was finally called, the master showed a little caution, agreeing to release young Mr. McCullough pending a hearing on the entire caseload, but only if he could be restricted to home monitoring.

  No problem, Fran told the public defender. Deep down, she liked the idea of having DeAndre trapped in the house with one of those electronic bracelets around his ankle, unable to leave for fear that a check-in phone call would catch him sneaking down the block. DeAndre was hauled back to the bullpen for another hour and half while Fran filled out the forms, only to be informed at the end of the process that she had to have a working telephone.

  “There isn’t any phone at this address?” said the juvenile staffer, holding a hand to his forehead. “The monitoring system requires a phone.”

  “Uh umm.”

  “Can you get a phone at that address?”

  “Not ’less you give me the money.”

  And so it was back down to the Village for another week, until Fran could arrange to have DeAndre stay with her aunt up above North Avenue. For some strange reason, the woman had a liking for the boy; and stranger still, DeAndre always behaved whenever he was up at her Etting Street rowhouse.

  “They gonna let Andre stay on Etting?” asks Tyreeka.

  “If I say so …”

  Hearing the doubt in Fran’s tone, Tyreeka pouts, but holds her tongue.

  “… but I feel like I ought to leave him be. I feel like I should tell them I can’t control him no more.”

  Tyreeka stares sullenly out the window.

  “He think he so much a man,” says Fran. “He can just stay where he is until his hearing.”

  “That could be months,” says Tyreeka.

  Fran ignores her, rambling on instead about DeAndre having money still on the street. He had fronted Boo forty vials, for which Boo owed him two hundred dollars.

  “He wants me to get his money for him,” says Fran.

  “From Boo?”

  “Mmm hmm. He needs some things while he in there and I ain’t got what to pay for it with,” Fran explains. “He told me to get the two hundred that Boo owes him.”

  Wounded at the thought of spending spring and maybe even summer without DeAndre, Tyreeka says little else for the rest of the trip, but as it turns out, she has no need for worry.

  In Fran’s world, you stand with your children against the downtown agencies. DeAndre can
’t often be trusted, but the bureaucrats can’t be trusted at all. Three days later, the paperwork is complete and DeAndre returns that morning to the same Baltimore courthouse and the same juvenile master, who informs him that his pretrial release will be violated if he fails to attend Francis M. Woods High School, or if he fails to remain inside his aunt’s house after 3:30 P.M.

  “You understand what you have to do?”

  DeAndre nods.

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “Yes, um … Yessir.”

  From the back bench, Fran allows herself a smirk at DeAndre, sitting there with his hands in his lap. No bluster. No defiance. She can’t help savoring the moment. When they leave the courthouse, it’s almost three; her son has only enough time to go by Fayette Street for some clothes before he has to be indoors on Etting Street.

  “I got to get with Boo,” he tells Fran.

  “You ain’t got time today.”

  “He got my money.”

  Fran shrugs. If Boo owes him money, she assures her son, then it’s up to DeAndre to collect. When she tried to press Boo, he only gave her a few dollars, insisting he didn’t owe any more than that.

  “Me and him gonna talk,” says DeAndre with some bitterness.

  Fran shrugs again. “That’s ’tween you two. But you best get your ass up to your aunt’s house before you get violated.”

  DeAndre arrives at Etting Street before the first monitored call and stays indoors that evening. The next morning, he shows up at school on time, but slips out after his third period to run the streets. He checks Ramsay and Stricker, then all along McHenry, then at the basketball rim in the Lemmon Street alley. No sign of Boo. DeAndre is convinced: The nigger is ducking him.

  He’s up early the next morning, scouring the side streets from McHenry to the expressway, trying to pick up the scent of lost money. The day is warmer than most, and DeAndre moves among clusters of kids walking with their schoolbooks, the older ones off to Southwestern or Francis Woods, the younger ones drifting north toward Harlem Park Middle School.

  Out near the bus stop on Fayette, DeAndre strikes gold. He pulls up the hoody on his sweatshirt and begins racing down a side alley at a knot of kids on the corner.