The Corner Read online

  Gary walks across the bedroom toward the front windows, trying to wrap his mind around some better thought. Two plastic milk crates filled with old record albums are stacked hard by one window—flotsam from that happier time. Gary leans forward, hands on both knees, scanning the remains of his collection. Marvin Gaye. Barry White. The Temptations. And, of course, Curtis Mayfield, who used to mean everything to Gary. Curtis, always speaking for sanity, warning that if there’s hell below, we’re all going to go. Gary pulls out an album, looks at it, then returns it carefully to the crate.

  Ancient history here, too; vinyl sound-of-soul relics gathering dust in the age of hip-hop rhythm kings and gangsta posers. Gary has no ear for what the younguns call music nowadays.

  He sings.

  “If you had a choice of colors …”

  A beautiful voice. A strong tenor for any church choir.

  “… which one would you choose, my brothers.”

  The sound echoes through the house. Gary hears Tony stirring a floor above him. Gary starts another couplet, but the moment is broken by a tumult below the front windows. The lyric is lost amid angry cursing.

  “On the ground! On the ground, motherfucker!”

  Gary creeps to the right window, peering around the edge of the dirty sheet that passes for a curtain.

  “Get your hand out of your pocket. You hear me? Get your hand out of your pocket.”

  Plainclothesmen. Knockers. Six police jump out of two unmarked Chevrolets and shove two men to the sidewalk right below Gary’s window.

  “What?” asks Tony from the doorway.

  “Shsshhhh,” Gary hisses. “Poh-leece.”

  “Who is it?”

  Gary shakes his head.

  “Bob Brown?”

  Bob Brown is the predominant constabulary scourge of every doper in the Franklin Square neighborhood—fiends in this part of town invoke the name as something distinct from the rest of the Baltimore Police Department. Whenever he makes an entrance, lookouts actually shout “Bob Brown,” rather than the generic “Five-Oh” or “Time Out.”

  Gary shakes his head. Not Mr. Brown, not this time. “Knockers,” he whispers. “I don’t know none of ’em.”

  Tony steps softly toward the edge of the other window and looks down at the encounter. These police aren’t regulars in the neighborhood, and the two on the ground aren’t familiar faces either. Both are on their backs; one on the sidewalk, the other in the dirt where the pavement breaks at the base of a small tree. Both are pleading innocence. Three of the plain-clothesmen stand over them, shouting; a fourth stands in the street, eyefucking the crews on the Mount Street corners. The other two are waiting next to the unmarked Chevrolets, both cars idling in the fast lane of Fayette Street, the front and rear doors splayed open.

  “Don’t fucking lie to me!”

  “No, we just …”

  “Motherfucker, get your pants down.”

  Gary and Tony stand silently at the windows, watching the scene play out. A white police is doing the shouting; two black companions poke through jacket pockets. The young man in the dirt is still trying to argue the case, but his partner has already gone cold, his hardest game face now showing only hate. Slowly, still on their backs, the two lower their pants to their knees, their exposed legs shaking in the winter air. A police picks at the waistbands of their boxers, looking south. Dickie checks in ten-degree weather, but there’s no dope down there in those Jockeys or anywhere else for that matter. On the sidewalk is the brown sandwich bag one man was carrying. A knocker picks it up, looks inside and then, satisfied, drops it back on the pavement.

  The white police checks the sidewalk farther down Fayette Street, looking for loose paper or vials.

  “I didn’t see anything get thrown,” a black police says. A subtle suggestion, perhaps; one cop trying to tell another that, hey, maybe he got this one wrong.

  “Man, I swear we clean,” says the man in the dirt.

  “Shut up,” says the white police.

  But the sidewalk search yields nothing. After a moment or two more, with the wind whipping trash and dead leaves down Fayette Street, the young man in the dirt looks up at the black police and risks another plea.

  “Man, can we put our pants on?”

  The cop gives a quick, cursory nod and both men hoist themselves up on their elbows, undulating like crabs on the sidewalk as they work to dress themselves.

  The white plainclothesman tires of the game. He walks back toward one of the idling Chevrolets, turning to shout a final line at the two men on the ground. Dope or no dope, there’s always a moral to the story.

  “Don’t let me see your ass out here again.”

  Then they’re gone, the Chevrolets roaring up Fayette Street toward some new encounter. With every tout and dealer watching from the Mount Street corners, the two young men slowly gather up their humiliation and step off.

  Gary and Tony are still right above them in the window, bearing witness with no small amazement. Across the street, the Death Row and Diamond in the Raw crews immediately reopen the Mount Street shop.

  “Man, I can’t believe that,” Gary says, shaking his head in disgust. “They were just coming out of the carryout. The one boy had a sandwich is all.”

  Tony snorts in agreement.

  “I can’t believe it,” Gary says again. Twenty people standing out there at Mount and Fayette Streets—all of them selling or buying drugs, half of them dirty with the shit—and the knockers are jumping out and messing with two dopeless niggers and a meatball sub. Undressing them in the street, telling them they can’t be out here, then driving off to do the same to someone else.

  “Like they did to me last year,” says Gary. “Knocked out my teeth over a corn chip. And then afterward telling me I can’t stand on the street where I live.”

  Gary shakes his head slowly, but without any real sense of indignation. The shit just happens out here nowadays; it doesn’t have to make sense. Out here, any fiend can tell you, the rule of thumb is that the less sense something makes, the more people run to it. The dealers, the touts, the users, the knockers—all of them are out here every day and every night, pretending to play this game like it can be won or lost, like the game has rules even. But it’s somehow beyond all that; from the inside looking out, it’s obvious to Gary that every last rule will be broken. His breath clouds a windowpane as he watches the Death Row tout begin taking new orders, sending two white boys around the corner toward the alley on Mount. Then Gary’s eyes fix on a new sight.

  “Dag,” he says, and with good reason, for coming up the hill from Gilmor is the Gaunt One herself, the skin-and-bone harbinger of all that Gary loves and fears in this neighborhood.

  “Ronnie,” he says.

  Veronica Boice, Tony’s cousin and Gary’s onagain-off-again girl, is walking up Fayette Street in a slow glide. Her eyes dart from corner to corner, her wide mouth curls at one end in bemused confidence. It’s Ronnie on the prowl.

  Feeling vulnerable, Gary steps back from the window and begins charting out a potential disaster, burning out his high in the process. A frantic computation clicks through his brain: Ronnie catches me and Tony up here; Ronnie figures we had a caper; Ronnie knows we did the blast without her; Ronnie makes me pay.

  When the issue is thirty on the hype, hell hath no fury like Ronnie Boice. Like that time last year, when Gary cut Ronnie out of a blast and she actually called the police on him, made him take a domestic assault charge that was still hovering over him, floating around the city court system somewhere. Or the time before that, when Ronnie burned some Jamaicans for a stash and then put the thing on Gary, who was completely baffled when a six-pack of wild-eyed Jakes kicked in his door and demanded repayment. And Ronnie—all ninety pounds of her—managed to create such mayhem with only her mind and her mouth. On these corners, she was a force of nature, and Gary, though he had every reason to fear her, could never manage to get past his awe. Ronnie would burn him time and again; she would water his dr
ugs and switch his syringe. She would tell him she loved him even as she was putting him in harm’s way. Eventually, if he wasn’t careful—and Gary wasn’t careful—Ronnie would get him dead. But the woman could make money out of nothing. For that reason alone, Gary stayed with her.

  But he does not want to see her now. Definitely not now.

  Gary motions to Tony, and one behind the other, they lurch down the stairs to the first floor. In the hallway, Gary catching a glimpse of a luminous stretch of canvas on the wall. Commissioned by Gary and painted by his friend Blue, the work pictured an ancient rune that Gary had chosen from a cosmology book, a life-force symbol that he took as the logo for Lightlaw, his home development company. Another time, another life.

  They pass through the wrecked kitchen, then down a half flight of stairs into a narrow corridor of unfinished basement. They make their way toward the rear, where a sliver of light is visible from the other side of a rotting wooden barrier. Tony opens the door and sunlight streams through the portal. Like true commandos in their camouflage gear, they stride out the door and through the trashed rear alley, hunching into the wind.

  “Where you headed?” asks Gary.

  “Up the way. You gonna see Ronnie?”

  Gary nods. He’ll run up to Fulton, then come back down Fayette and catch Ronnie from the other direction. Make it seem like he just rolled out of bed at his mother’s house. Ask Ronnie if she’s got her hooks into any kind of caper—something that’ll get him over—all the while hoping she won’t see the dust in his eyes.

  “Well, okay, you’ll see what’s up,” says Tony.

  “Awright, Mo,” says Gary. “I’ll be back to you.”

  “Awright then.”

  Tony heads south toward Baltimore Street, and Gary turns right, taking the long way back onto Fayette. Ronnie is still downslope at Mount Street, still scoping the corners for opportunity. Finally she sees Gary, and lets go of a smile so knowing and lethal that even in ten degrees, Gary can feel a separate chill down his spine. She knows.

  “Hey, love,” she says, looking hard into his eyes.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “How you doing?”

  “Awright,” Gary mumbles.

  “How you feeling?”

  “Okay.”

  “Mmm hmm,” says Ronnie Boice.

  She knows. Dag, she always knows.

  DeAndre McCullough wakes to the morning cold fully dressed and still weary from the night before. Slowly, he rolls sideways on the narrow mattress, leaving a worn blanket in the center trough where the springs have all but collapsed. He lets one arm fall over the higher edge of the bed and slowly opens one eye. Below and to the right of him on the baseboard, he catches the brown sheen of a cockroach and reaches under the bed. He comes up with his one of his mother’s shoes, firing it against the wall, missing by inches. The roach scurries off.

  DeAndre closes his eyes, trying to regain sleep, but the noise from the old Zenith, which runs nonstop in this back bedroom, has grabbed his attention. He buries his face in the mattress, but he can’t help listening.

  “Boy,” he mutters with contempt, sensing his younger brother at the foot of the bed. “You watch some stupid shit.”

  DeRodd shrugs. “It was on when I got up.”

  “That don’t mean you got to watch it.”

  DeRodd says nothing. The dinosaur starts into his dinosaur song and DeAndre raises his head just high enough to glare at his brother.

  “Barney ain’t shit,” he says finally.

  “I’m not watching,” DeRodd insists.

  “Off-brand, purple-ass dinosaur,” mutters DeAndre, swinging an open palm at the younger boy’s head.

  “Ow,” says DeRodd softly.

  DeAndre raises his legs slowly and drops first one, then the other over the edge of the mattress until he’s finally sitting up, rubbing both eyes with his hands. He can remember staggering up here about two in the morning with a cheesesteak from Bill’s; the wrapper is on the floor in front of him. He can remember that he had a good day down on Fairmount yesterday; money in his pocket and Boo owing him still more for the vials DeAndre fronted him. He can remember getting blunted up with Tae and Sean. In fact, he can remember pretty much everything; that business about weed making you forget things is all bullshit.

  “Why ain’t you in school?” DeAndre asks.

  “Saturday.”

  DeAndre grunts. A good enough answer, but it’s not in him to give any eight-year-old the last word.

  “You should go anyway.”

  “Ain’t no school on Saturday.”

  “You should go there and wait for Monday.”

  DeRodd pouts and DeAndre swings again with an open hand. This time the younger boy is ready and ducks away.

  “Where Ma at?” asks DeAndre.

  DeRodd shrugs.

  Stretching slowly, DeAndre rises and catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror above the dresser. The forest of short dreds that top his head Bart Simpson-style is crushed to one side by the night’s sleep; in profile, he looks like a coal black rooster. His hair is his most distinct ive feature, a detail that declares him unique in a neighborhood where image is everything.

  Otherwise, he is a study in urban conformity, and within minutes, he is primed and dressed to match the set: a black puff ski parka left open to flap in the breeze, a thick blue and white flannel shirt worn outside oversized jeans that ride low on the hips, the requisite high-top Nikes that go for upwards of $125 a pair.

  Running down the steps from the second floor, he digs one hand into the front pocket of his denims, pulling out a tight roll of twenties, tens, and fives. He pauses in the empty vestibule to count it off; four hundred twenty-five and some change, and for once it’s all there. Not like last weekend when he and the boys brought some girls to the vacant house up the block on Fayette. They smoked like ten bags of weed, and the next morning, DeAndre woke alone and hurting in his parents’ old bedroom, his gallery of pinups mocking him from all sides. When he checked his pocket that morning, it wasn’t seven hundred, but about three-forty on the roll. And DeAndre for the life of him couldn’t remember where it went. Weed? Girls? Or maybe someone waited for him to fall out on the mattress and then dipped into the bank.

  He had slept in today. By the time he gets down the block and around the corner, it’s afternoon and the fiends—white boys coming north from Pigtown, those of his own hue rolling down the hill from Monroe Street—have collected into a loose, shifting crowd around the corner of Baltimore and Gilmor. Moving down the litter-blown block, he looks older than his fifteen years, outwardly confident in a way that teenagers seldom are. The wayward hairstyle is recognizable a block away, the clothes tailored to this season’s G-thang look, but nothing carries enough flash to attract unnecessary attention. No gold on the neck or hands to catch the winter sun—nothing that glimmers enough to attract stickup boys or that a knocker might take for cheap probable cause. By and large, the McCullough boy is a study in a lower key.

  Arriving at the alley entrance to Fairmount, he takes stock of his real estate. This is mine, he thinks, watching the touts work the crowd. I made it happen. Ain’t no kid stuff, like that bullshit last summer when his crew tried their hand at slinging only to get plucked bad by the big boys.

  For two years now, DeAndre and the others—Tae and R.C., Boo and Manny Man, Dinky and Brian and the rest—have been carrying themselves like a gang, calling themselves C.M.B. for Crenshaw Mafia Brothers, a name agreed upon after the fourth or fifth viewing of Boyz in the Hood at Harbor Park. So far, C.M.B. was something of a rump creation, sandwiched between the more established Edmondson Avenue Boys to the north and the Ramsay and Stricker crew down bottom. More lethal than all of them is the crew from the high-rise projects to the east. A five-tower nightmare at the western edge of the city’s downtown, Lexington Terrace has so many buildings from which to draw members that the Terrace Boys are always deep. Still, the C.M.B. contingent had Fayette Street to itself, and ever si
nce they turned twelve and thirteen, the boys had been playing at gangster. Two years ago, that meant mostly street fights and dotting brick walls and asphalt with Crenshaw Mafia tags. Last summer, they stepped up a bit, stealing cars one after another for the joy of it or sneaking down to the Pulaski corners to try their hand at drug slinging. In any other world, it would be called criminal; on Fayette Street, it still amounted to casual misadventure. At Hollins and Pulaski, C.M.B.’ s initial foray on a corner ended comically enough, when their supplier waited until the summer’s last re-up, then disappeared on them with all their pooled profits.

  Tae, R.C., and the others were still moaning about it, but DeAndre, at least, had been spared that disaster. Instead, he had spent the last half of the summer under the wing of a New Yorker, Bugsy by name, who saw promise in DeAndre and set him up with a sixty-forty split on packages of blue-topped coke vials. Working on consignment, DeAndre and a handful of others had gone big-time, opening up the old strip where the 1500 block of Fairmount Avenue runs into Gilmor.

  Fairmount had been dead most of the last year, when Stashfinder and the other knockers hit it hard, chasing the action back up to Mount and Fayette, or down to the lower end by Baltimore and Stricker, leaving Fairmount to the ghosts. But it was still prime territory. Tiny Fairmount, a two-block alley street of rowhouses teeing into Gilmor, offered darkness and a warren run of side alleys and walkways. A tactical night mare for the knockers, it was ideal terrain for a young dealer working a ground stash. Of course, it was also a nice setup for the stickup boys, so that the likes of Odell or Shorty Boyd could jump on a whole crew, lining them up and taking every damn thing. But DeAndre would carry that; getting jacked now and again was, after all, a part of the game.