The Corner (18 page)

There was no more to it than that. No anger, no recrimination, no polemics against the police or the government or the white man. That wasn’t the McCullough way. If W.M. blamed anyone, he blamed the men and women in the street, the sons and the daughters who had lost their way, who didn’t understand life the way he did. If it were up to me, he’d sometimes tell people, you wouldn’t need prisons and you wouldn’t need jails either. If he had possession over Judgment Day, that gas chamber
down on Eager Street wouldn’t shut down until the corners were clear. He could say things like that and mean them, feeling the vengeance warming in his veins. And then he’d walk out to the cab for his afternoon tour and see Gary coming from the alley tester line, or June Bey nodding at the pay phone, or DeAndre, his grandson—and a bright boy, too—huddled at the mouth of Vine Street with the other touts and lookouts. At such moments, W.M.’ s heart would break and all the anger would rush out.

He had lived the way a man was supposed to live. He had played by the rules, working all his life, working still to make ends meet, though he was now of an age when most men retire. He had never gone on welfare, or sought a handout, or complained about what did or didn’t come his way. He had taken a good woman and kept his vows. He had brought fifteen children into the world, loved them, given them food and clothes and a home, and sent them to schools to learn things that he never had a chance to know. He had not been as clever as other men, perhaps, or as wise with his money and property. And he had never really understood the forces arrayed against him. But then, none of that can be claimed as part of our national premise, our enduring myth that says America is the land of opportunity, the last best hope for all races and religions, and that any man who stays true to himself and works hard here can and will succeed.

For the last half-century in the city of Baltimore, William McCullough has stayed true to himself and worked as hard as any man conceivably can. At age sixty-five, he has the woman with whom he shared a lifetime, Miss Roberta. He has many children and grandchildren, some of whom make him proud, some of whom don’t. He collects a $37-a-month pension. Six days a week—some weeks, seven—he drives a cab.

And every night, he comes home to Vine Street.

The snake has found Gary McCullough curled on the bed, the soiled sheets twisted around his legs. He’s half-awake and half listening as the clock radio sputters Sunday morning sermons in a dull, metallic whisper.

The snake speaks his name, and Gary, with a supreme effort, rolls over and sits up at the edge of the sagging mattress, his feet touching a linoleum floor wet from the Friday night rain that sent a flood rolling down the back cellar steps of his parents’ house on Vine. Hunching over as a wave of nausea hits, he cups his pounding head. He longs to go back to sleep, even that half-assed, no-resting heroin sleep that greets him every night, but the snake has his attention.

He reaches up, stretching as he gropes for the bare lightbulb in the ceiling socket. He finds it, gives a twist, then falls back to the mattress, spent. The weak light pushes back a bit of the darkness behind the mounds of molding clothes that frame the thin room.

It’s a grim, tight space at the bottom of the Vine Street rowhouse, sprinkled with flotsam and jetsam from Gary’s wanderings, bits and pieces that could have had a purpose, that once sparked a righteous McCullough plan, but now lay discarded, gathering dust: a busted black-and-white TV, a car’s rearview mirror, a set of keys, church fliers, a broken clock, a chipped porcelain statue of embracing lovers.

Within arm’s length of the bed stands a broken dresser for life’s few absolute necessities: bottle caps, matches, a jar of water, syringes. Behind the paraphernalia rests a box fan that makes do as a coat rack now, but come summer, it’s all there is to push the stale air and help Gary breathe through his asthma attacks. At the head of the mattress is a homemade wooden stool that serves as Gary’s library shelf. A well-thumbed Bible shares the perch with a high school physics book, a grade school civics text, Thoreau’s
Walden
, and Elie Wiesel’s
Night
—books rescued from trash piles or church basements, then read and reread by Gary with keen interest. The Bible is creased and marked at Psalm 38, a verse of shame and repentance that resonates in Gary’s mind night after night.

True penitence from within the haze. Gary knows the words by rote, reading them over and over in the dim basement light. And in the margin of the psalm, he has inked a rough graffito plea: “God help me, please.”

But not now. Not this morning.

The snake won’t be placated with psalms or supplications. Gary scratches his cheek and looks above him to the narrow wall shelf that holds the the other religious artifact in his basement world, the Box of True Blasts. Shaped like a cigar box, but smaller, the balsa-wood container serves as repository and museum for the touchstones of Gary’s life on
the corner—a treasure chest of happy memories to be perused in the spirit of nostalgia. He takes down the box and dumps its contents on the bed: the glassine bags, marked and stamped with an array of designs, logos, and slogans; the plastic vials, in a variety of sizes, each with a different colored top. Each a memento, a remembrance of bombs past, each a keepsake from a successful crusade, from a moment when a fiend got within snatching distance of the holy grail.

The green vial on the top of the pile? He got that one last year at Mount and Fayette, from the New York Boy, Scar, back when Scar had something to sell. Drop a little of that coke in some dope and yes Lawd, you had a speedball that would sing. And the Family Affair bag from this fall. Dag, that was right. But the recollection makes him grimace. The box offers nothing for the here and now—only touchstones from days gone.

Gary leans forward, fumbling with the dresser’s top drawer, pulling it toward him and rifling the contents for a Newport butt he left there last night. It’s a new habit that Ronnie gave him back in November, so now, in the daily pursuit of dollars for dope, he has to husband a little bit more pocket change for smokes. More often than not, he’s unable to afford a pack, so he buys singles from the Koreans for a quarter each. He lights up and pulls hard for the nicotine, getting off a good couple of puffs, then stubs the filter into the damp linoleum. He waits, checking himself, taking stock.

No good. No good at all.

He goes back to the dresser, this time for an empty glassine bag. He holds it to the light and gives a little tap, then another, staring hard. Against all visible evidence, he grabs a burnt-bottom bottle cap and taps lightly at the bag, coaxing out a few grains of residue. He takes a syringe and adds a few drops of water, then pulls it up without even bothering to wave a match under the bottle cap, hunts a vein and slams the shot. For a few seconds, he’s hope defined: the junkie alchemist, trying desperately to turn lead into gold. But nothing, no rush.

Gary searches for his clothes. One pair of pants is balled up on the bed; a second pair lies on the floor along with his shoes, a flannel shirt, and a sweater. For a moment, he makes no move to retrieve them. Instead, he folds his hands and bows his shaved head, a monk sending a silent prayer to a silent god. Let this pass.

But the snake is on the move.

It’s Gary’s worst fear. That snake down there, sliding through his
intestines, growing, gathering strength, pushing its way through the soft organs of his underbelly, into his stomach, the slow climb up his esophagus, and then into his throat, cutting off his air, strangling him on one end, breaking his bowels on the other. For many of the fiends, it isn’t like that. For them, withdrawal is a few days of low-grade flu, a sickness to be dealt with like any other. You take some aspirin, you crawl into bed, and you stay there and get what sleep you can until you come out the other side. For them, it’s mind over matter, withdrawal being more about soul than body.

But for Gary, there’s no play in it; the thing is all physical. For him, the very idea of withdrawal is epic because the snake owns every cell, every vein, every organ. Like last month, when he let his mother send him down to North Carolina to stay with his younger brother, Dan. Willing and determined, Gary fortified himself with one last blast, then crawled into the back of his brother’s van. And he tried. Lord, they don’t know how he tried. But the nausea never seemed to stop, nor did the craving slacken. He wrestled the snake for a few days, then stole off to find a corner near his brother’s house. And that was the thing, too: You can’t run from it. The corner is everywhere.

Now, galvanized by fear, he dresses at flank speed, pulling on one pair of pants, then a second to brace him against the February cold. No socks in the basement, though, so the shoes get laced over bare feet, the leather edges digging into his ankles. He pauses for a moment, looking down, and almost manages a smile at the pointy-toed, two-tone dress shoes, burgundy and tan, bought on a lark for four bills in a secondhand shop because they reminded him of better days. He starts up the stairs, then stops, rubbing his head. Where’s the hat? Can’t go nowheres without the hat.

Dag.

He tears the bedding apart, finding it wedged between the mattress and the warped wall panel. A lucky California Angels cap that’s seen him through it before. He wears it with the brim behind him, smoothing the band against his forehead. The backward angel, up and moving, ready to wade into the mix.

He navigates the narrow passage through the basement, then makes his way up the steep staircase, climbing over and around an avalanche of bundled clothing tossed down the steps. He emerges in the center of the rowhome’s first floor, stepping into a dining room where the table has been pushed to the wall, then covered with clothing, papers, and a
dozen other workaday things. In the McCullough home, the kitchen long ago gave the dining room a beating, forcing its furniture and formality against the far wall, giving the back of the first floor to Miss Roberta’s cooking and the chipped Formica table from which her family feeds.

Gary pauses for a moment at the basement door, caught by the sunlight from the back kitchen window. He wipes at his eyes, trying to adjust to the sight of his mother, working the stove, fixing W.M.’s lunch.

“Uh, Ma, I … ah, I need …”

His voice is soft, fading beneath the talk-show chatter of daytime television. She shakes her head. She doesn’t have it, she tells him, and Gary knows it’s true. If she had twenty dollars, she would reluctantly give ten to him, despite herself, so as not to watch her child suffer. He nods, accepting, and she offers instead to cook him some breakfast. An egg-and-bacon sandwich.

Gary shakes his head. The nausea drives him out of the kitchen and through the front door. He’s on Vine Street, the winter wind cutting through his sweater and savaging his bare ankles. Up on Monroe, there is a feeding frenzy as fiends flow from a tester line—freebies thrown to fiends as advertising for the day’s package. Spider Bags, too—this was a double blow, as the bags with the black widow on them are a definite bomb.

Gary knows he’s missed his chance, but he jogs up to the corner anyway, pushing into the wind, arriving in time to watch Tiny give out the last one and glide off. Gary stands there in the flow of just-served fiends, his hand out, his hunger on display. He tries a plea.

“Hey Janice.”

He gives Janice his stepped-on puppy look, but she ignores him. She has her own need; they all do. Gary, though, takes the refusal to heart. When I had it, he tells himself, I shared it. I shared it with crudballs who won’t give me the time of day now.

He’s alone at the top of the alley, standing amid the wind-whipped trash. He feels the snake move, then makes up his mind and heads off to find Ronnie. She’ll make him suffer, but she’ll also get him out of the gate.

There is a part of Gary that hates himself for leaning into Ronnie’s punches, for putting up with her games for the sake of a blast. She calls herself his girlfriend, tells him she loves him, but the truth is, there’s no sexual charge in the relationship, nothing that anyone could mistake for affection. They had messed around a few times, for appearances’ sake
more than anything else, but Ronnie holds no real attraction for Gary, save for her ability to make it happen from nothing. Every day, Gary pisses and moans over her crudball moves, over the abuse he takes. Every day, he tells himself that it’s all one way, that he has tried to end the relationship only to have her follow him around and pull him back. Every day, he tells himself that this is the last time, that after Ronnie gets him the blast he’ll cut her loose for good.

But there is no getting around Veronica Boice. She is the neighborhood sorceress, a rare mixture of will and wisdom and evil. She’s different from Gary, who can’t wrestle with the snake without the fear rushing up and overwhelming him. Not Ronnie. She channels the pain into a demonic fury that seems likely to crush anyone standing between her and her shot. Gary saw it happen a few weeks back, when Ronnie took her ninety-pound frame up Fayette Street and stared down the New Yorkers.

“Gimme a blast,” she told Gee. “Last one wadn’t shit.”

There she was in the middle of Fayette and Monroe, not a nickel to her name, a whippet of steel wire standing up to big, bad, bat-waving Gee, threatening: “Gimme a blast or I’ll call the motherfucking poh-leece. You know I will.”

The crowd took it in, amazed. Gee laughed, made a joke, tried to play it off in front of all the touts and customers. But he could see it; he could see the dusty bitch dropping dime over a single vial and he could see that the choice for him was between minor charity and felony murder.