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  Ella watches, pleased. For all his bluster, DeAndre is good with the little ones.

  More roughnecks arrive. Huggie and the twins, Arnold and Ronald, bound through the doors, excitement glowing on their faces. “Got that cat,” Arnold announces, proudly, piquing R.C.’ s interest.

  “Yeah. We got that cat been hitting our coop,” Ronald boasts.

  “What cat?”

  “Cat been getting our birds,” Ronald says. “Huggie killed it dead.”

  “Yeah, what you do?” R.C. asks.

  “Caught that cat and threw it in with Shamrock’s pit bull. Tore his ass up,” Huggie says proudly.

  “Shit, that ain’t nothin’,” R.C. says, punching a hole in their glee. “You shoulda got DeAndre.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Ronald says, a little hurt. “You should of heard that bitch scream.”

  “DEANDRE,” R.C. roars, “DEANDRE, COME HERE. YO, TELL THEM WHAT YOU DO WHEN A CAT GOES AFTER YOUR BIRDS.”

  DeAndre puts Dena down and slowly joins the boys.

  “Go on, tell them,” R.C. urges.

  DeAndre smiles. “This cat been around my coop, trying to get in. I saw him and went and got this pair of thick gloves, the kind my uncle uses with the crabs, real thick so you can’t get scratched. Then I trapped that motherfucker. He tried to get me but he couldn’t get through the gloves.”

  DeAndre has seated himself on a table. The other boys, R.C. included, are silent as DeAndre’s enthusiasm for his tale catches hold of them.

  “He was tough,” DeAndre says. “I broke his legs, broke each one. Then I tied him up and hung him from this tree …”

  His voice drops, drawing the others closer.

  “… got me some lighter fluid, squirted that sucker down, then hit him with a match. Fucked him all up.”

  “MAN, YOU A CRAZY FUCKER,” R.C. shouts, while Tae and Manny bang the table in approval.

  “Damn,” Ronald says, admitting admiration.

  Ella has stopped working with the little children. Frozen by DeAndre’s account, she is slow to respond. “DeAndre,” she asks finally, “why did you do that? That cat was only doing what it has to.”

  “Miss Ella, a cat gotta do what a cat gotta do and I gotta do what I gotta do,” DeAndre answers, nonchalant. His response touches something deep within the other boys and they howl approval.

  “You sick, boy,” R.C. says, elated with it.

  “Cat killed my birds,” says DeAndre with finality. “Cat gotta pay.”

  Ella shakes her head. She has known DeAndre most of his life; she’s seen him as a lovesick puppy, chasing her Pooh up and down Fayette Street, working through the agony of that first childhood crush. She’s seen him running the streets, getting into more and more mayhem as he has grown. She knows DeAndre is clever and open and capable of wonderful moments, like before, when he had Dena Sparrow laughing with delight. She also knows he can, if the idea suits him, torture and burn a cat.

  The phone rings and Ella steps back into her office. Good news, thank God. Tito is home in California, having gone no farther than a long, all-night drive down the coast. Ella gets the word from her daughter, hangs up and sighs, visibly relieved.

  “Miss Ella?”

  Little Stevie is at her office door.

  “What, Stevie?”

  “Can we take the football out on the playground?”

  “If you bring it back.”

  He races off and Ella leaves the office to spend the rest of the afternoon with the younger children. The older boys soon depart, off on some business best discussed outside the rec. R.C.’ s voice lingers, carrying from Mount Street.

  Eventually, the darkness presses in and Ella checks the clock. It’s half past six, time to send her charges home. As a last ritual, she gathers Tastykakes and potato chip bags—snacks that come to the rec center from Echo House, the neighborhood outreach center, and the St. Martin’s parish soup kitchen—passing them out as the kids move back across the threshold, huddling on the blacktop around the dim light that escapes from the windows in the rec center’s doors.

  Inside, surrounded by the sudden silence, Ella lugs out the bucket and mop, and begins to clean. She returns the toys and games to the lockers, straightens the chairs, cleans the finger paint from one of the table tops. She looks around, satisfied at last. Then she turns out the light, locks the door, rolls down the grate, and steps into darkness. Some of the kids are playing on the sliding board, some follow her to Mount Street, where the constant drone becomes specific.

  “Got them red tops.”

  “In the Hole.”

  “Death Row.”

  Ella watches two of the children cross Fayette Street amid a swarm of dealers scrambling to serve two white men in a pickup.

  She draws her coat close and crosses Mount Street, moving once again through the corner crowd.

  No sense at all.

  Fran Boyd is up out of the basement early this morning, smoking the day’s first Newport and watching from the top step, her usual perch, as Mount and Fayette begins to stir. Up at Mount, Buster and Country have dragged their tired carcasses to the corner and are waiting stoically for Scar to bring the package. A couple doors from Fran, Ronnie Hughes is out front as well, tinkering with the engine of his shit-brown Buick, trying to get it started on this late January morning. DeRodd’s father, Michael Hearns, waits beside Ronnie wordlessly, his breath freezing above him in small soft clouds. The two are planning an expedition to a county mall, and Ronnie likes to get an early jump whenever possible. Better to get in and out before the security people are fully alert.

  “Hey, Fran,” Ronnie calls. An invitation.

  She nods curtly, but says nothing. Sitting there in the cold, her narrow behind resting on an old sofa cushion, Fran is dressed more for fall than the deep of winter. Seemingly oblivious to the chill, she looks past Ronnie to scour the traffic around Fayette and Mount, searching for that first thin thread of a caper that can be parlayed into a vial or two of coke to go on top of the morning’s blast of dope. As for a daytime boosting spree with Ronnie and Michael, she’ll pass. For one thing, it hasn’t been great with Michael lately; she can’t remember what it was she saw in him. For another, things haven’t been feeling right in the stores, what with Fran worrying about another charge and security always breathing down her neck. Instead, she settles down on the front steps of the Dew Drop, waiting for a better alternative. She sits and glares, her rock-solid, don’t-tread-on-me visage offering nothing beyond raw calculation.

  The front matters to Denise Francine Boyd, because the tough exterior is always an essential part of her game. Can’t let anyone believe there are cracks in the facade, because facade is most of what she is about. The I-don’t-give-a-shit stare, the implication of recklessness accord her a high berth in the pecking order. And like anyone else closing in on a second decade of addiction, she’s also blessed with a mind that can find angles in a circle. Little Fran, all ninety-five pounds of her, is a coke-thinned wraith pushing the far side of her thirties, making it mostly on bark and only the rare bite. She has a face for the corner, armored by hard-boiled eyes that float in a sienna tea—a cold glare to deny even the suggestion of complex feelings. But behind the front is a woman with a battered, but still usable conscience—a caring soul that time and again proves itself a burdensome source of pain. Fran isn’t like Bunchie, her sister; years of living together have convinced Fran that Bunchie could truly care less about anything but getting that blast. Same with Stevie. Same with Sherry, if you counted liquor.

  There is Scoogie, of course, the oldest Boyd, living large a few blocks over in their grandmother’s house. Scoogie has a job and a car and cable TV and air-conditioning and everything else that doesn’t exist at the Dew Drop Inn. But there’s distance between Fran and her brother; she can’t lean on him, particularly with Scoogie insisting that he’s clean now, that he hasn’t been high in more than four years.

  Fran doesn’t believe it, and resents Scoogie for pretending to b
e better than she suspects he is. Still, Scoogie is living head-and-shoulders above the Dew Drop, and Fran is, therefore, by default, the closest thing to a moral force at the Fayette Street house. She’s the one who ventures into the kitchen to make sandwiches for DeRodd and his nephew, Little Stevie, who makes sure the school clothes are there, who interrupts the party in the basement to go upstairs and check on Ray Ray and her heart monitor. If there’s any weakness in Fran’s game, in fact, it’s in the vestiges of morality that her mother planted inside her, that special something the other children didn’t seem to get. But that all belongs to the early years, before her father’s anger managed to beat her mother down, before her mother found solace in the bottle and turned her back on Fran, before the Boyd children followed each other from malt liquor to cough syrup, weed to dope, dope to coke. So much pain, too much to think on right now.

  Fran continues scanning the street, and finally, sees Tyrell post himself on the corner, hooking up with Buster and Country. Fran gives him a little wave from her doorway. He nods slightly.

  Yes Lawd, she thinks, Tyrell’s down for the usual. Scar will be along soon and, as Scar’s lieutenant, Ty will then be in possession of the package, responsible for getting it out on the street, handling the money and the drugs while Scar sits back on rowhouse steps and eyes the action. Country and, if he’s lucky, Buster, will do the touting for Scar’s green tops. But it’s Tyrell who will take most of the risk, and Fran knows that Tyrell is beginning to stumble, dipping into the product.

  She saw him at it last month in the vestibule of her house; his body bent over, his nose dipping into his palm. Sensing her, he jerked himself erect and tried to play it off. Something in my eye, he muttered, and she just smiled.

  Out here, necessity always gives birth to a caper and it wasn’t long before Fran had Tyrell coming around the back of her house after Scar gave him the package, hooking up with Fran in the few minutes before he re-upped his workers. Just inside the basement door, she would shake the vials, skimming some of the coke off the top. Nobody was the wiser.

  So now she waits, her eyes locked on the other half of her little conspiracy. In another minute or two, Scar turns onto Fayette Street from Gilmor and walks toward Mount. Dressed in army fatigues, a walking bill-board for his Green Tops, there isn’t much flash to Scar—just a New York Boy, solitary and mysterious, a stranger to the neighborhood who showed up on the corner four or five years ago and began hustling. Nobody thought to challenge Scar because, in the end, nobody cared. His product is decent and that’s what matters. Besides, rumor has the New Yorkers all wired up with heavy connections. Fuck with them, and they blow you up and move to some new corner. No one on Fayette was really all that interested in taking any chances until last year, when the Diamond in the Raw crew started stretching out, declaring that Baltimore was for Baltimore people alone. There were three or four bodies—a couple of New Yorkers and a couple locals—and Scar felt compelled to disappear for a time. But then some of the Diamond crowd got scooped up by the Feds and things cooled. Scar was soon back on post, still a stranger; no one knew his name, his family, or even where he laid his head.

  Reputation and mystery aside, it is the lot of the New Yorkers—Scar, Primo, Gee Money, and the rest—to rely on the locals to sling and tout their product, and in West Baltimore, at least, good help is hard to find. Scar has a professional’s sense of discipline; save for weed, he doesn’t get high. Tyrell, however, is weak and Fran has found him.

  Fifteen minutes later, she’s up from the basement for the second time today, feeling very good indeed after reaping the benefits of her backdoor confederacy. She’s out on the stoop, watching Collins make a pass by the Mount Street touts in one of those new baby blue police cruisers, when Gary McCullough slips around the corner, his face aglow.

  “Hey,” says Gary.

  “Hey,” says Fran.

  “Stevie upstairs?”

  Fran nods and Gary starts past her. When they were together, Gary would talk forever about all this bullshit, rambling on about religion or politics or the stock market until Fran’s head was pounding. Now, between them, most conversations have a utilitarian simplicity. Gary spoke to her when he had something, when he needed something, or worst of all, when he failed to get something. Lord, she couldn’t stand to hear that man cry and whine.

  “Want some?” he asks her on the way inside.

  Fran shakes her head, thinking there ain’t going to be anything to share if he’s going to have Stevie cop for him. Gary was forever looking for someone else to go up to the corner on his behalf, thinking that a player with a harder look is less likely to get burned, when in fact it’s always a crapshoot. And Stevie—Lord, Fran’s brother might bring real dope back, but he had a dresser drawer upstairs with half a dozen syringes, each cocked and loaded with nothing stronger than tap water, each set to a different dosage—from twenty on the hype all the way to sixty. A mark like Gary would take his eyes off Stevie for half a second and the magic would never come.

  Sure enough, he’s downstairs on the steps ten minutes later, his ten dollars wasted and his face contorted in epic grief.

  “Man,” he says. “It was doo-doo.”

  Fran shakes her head.

  “You just don’t know,” says Gary, wounded. “I mean, dag.”

  Fran snorts derisively. “Gary,” she says. “You get watered-down so much you should have leaves and shit growing out your arms.”

  “What?”

  “You a got-damn plant.”

  No sympathy shown. Fran is hard; she can play the corner, but Gary is another thing entirely. By Fran’s reckoning, the longer he stays out here, the longer he takes abuse.

  “This isn’t your game,” she tells him.

  “Yeah,” he says, bitterly. “All right.”

  “I’m serious. You not made for this.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  She shakes her head and Gary drifts up the block, muttering to himself. Fran watches him go, feeling an utter sense of loss. Gary has been out here for years now, but still, on some level, she cannot accept it. Though there is no love left, she still cares for him and it’s hell to see him lost out here in a world for which he is totally unsuited. A part of Fran still wants to protect Gary, but the greater share of her knows there is no such thing as protection. For worse rather than better, Gary is in the mix.

  His fall from grace had a slow inevitability, but there were moments when it seemed like a rush job because Gary never did anything halfheartedly. Fran actually cried the first time she saw him on the corner copping ready rock. People had been telling her for weeks that he was on the pipe, that he was up on Monroe Street every day, but she had never seen it and didn’t believe it. Gary had for years been about nothing stronger than an occasional joint of weed; he had, for most of their time together, been down on Fran for her drugging. More than dope or coke, Gary was into his mysticism and cosmology, talking that high-on-life bullshit and working three jobs at once, bringing home so much money. When they were together, when DeAndre was little, Fran spent a lot of her time rushing around the county shopping malls trying to spend it, buying so many outfits and shoes, so much jewelry that she could never manage to wear it all. She just left most of it in the boxes or gave it away to friends. And DeAndre would be bouncing around the living room on Fayette Street with a $100 bill in his pocket—a child too young to even know what the cash was about. Gary would give him the money to show that he could, to make it clear to everyone that there was more than he needed.

  Looking back, Fran sees that she never really appreciated what they had, that she never understood why Gary worked so hard at so many jobs. In fact, she had never really been in love with him. At best, she had loved the idea of Gary, the raw energy of this wide-eyed workaholic who couldn’t stop spinning plans for them—plans that had started to take shape and very nearly became reality.

  She met him sixteen years ago when he was working at the pharmacy at Lexington and Fulton, making legiti
mate money as a counterman and then dealing some weed on the side. Fran did what came naturally; she flirted and talked enough shit to mess his little mind. Soon enough, her weed was for free.

  But the Boyds were street and Gary was, well, a McCullough. One of those churchgoing McCulloughs from Vine Street. From the first, Fran knew it was an unholy union. She saw how vulnerable he was, how little prepared he was for the real world of Fayette Street. Gary sold weed because he wanted quick money, but he was terrified of anything stronger; then he quit dealing altogether when his mother expressed her disapproval. Fran played at him for a while and Gary was enamored and willing. But he wasn’t hard like the others. He didn’t seem man enough to her.

  They had sex exactly once before Gary went off to college in Ohio. Fran knew she was pregnant, but let him go anyway, figuring it was his due, reasoning that Gary had no real business in her world. Five months into the pregnancy, she sent a telegram to Youngstown—not to bring Gary McCullough back, but simply to let him know what he had a right to know.

  To her amazement, the boy came back to West Baltimore.

  And Fran Boyd had never in her life had that kind of loyalty. She had never had anyone tell her he loved her to a point where she actually started believing it. But she wasn’t the right woman for Gary; she knew that much now. She wasn’t ever going to be the stay-put type, the happy homemaker that he was looking for. From the moment they moved in together, Gary made it clear he wanted her to be like his mother, and Fran made it equally clear she wasn’t Miss Roberta. She was the party girl and she’d been at the party ever since school days.

  Gangsters and players and users peopled her world. Yet there she was playing house with Gary, a true believer, a man who embraced everything from Muslim theology to vegetarianism. He worshiped science, too, as if it was a religion, reading his high school physics text over and over, talking endlessly about the great day when he would go back to Ohio State and become an engineer.

  But with DeAndre in a crib, the college plans were deferred. Still, Gary managed to manufacture a future far beyond anything Fran had ever allowed herself to imagine. The union job down at the Point became a supervisory position—$55,000 a year—and on top of that, Gary was moonlighting as a security guard out in Woodlawn. Fran had a good job downtown at the phone company and Gary was making even more money with his stocks and mutual funds. He bought the house at 1717 Fayette. He bought investment properties around the neighborhood and then he, Blue, and Blue’s brother started Lightlaw, their development and drafting company. Gary bought Fran a Mercedes. Bought himself another. Bought all kinds of things for Fran and DeAndre and everyone else.