The Corner (19 page)

Gee gave in, slipping her one just to see her gone. And Gary, watching all of this from the sidelines, was once again staggered by the kamikaze logic that Ronnie always brought to the game. Ronnie punking Gee in the middle of Monroe Street. Dag.

He warms now at the memory, at the thought of finding the girl. He cuts from Vine Street across the vacant lot and through the back alley behind his parents’ house, then out onto Fayette Street through a second gap in the rowhouses, arriving at Ronnie’s sister’s house, where Ronnie’s been spending the colder nights. Pulling one hand from inside the sweater cuff, he bangs twice on the door, then twice again.

One of the twins, sleepy, stumbles out of the front room, cracks the door, and stares mournfully out of the vestibule.

“She not here,” he says, closing the door before Gary has a chance to react. His world is shrinking; the snake twists maliciously down in his bowels. He turns back toward Monroe, but Eggy Daddy and Fat Curt
and the rest of the regulars are already on station, hustling the morning crowd. No work up there.

He heads down the hill. Fran might take care of him, for old time’s sake. Or DeAndre. Yeah, Andre, who’s got it going on down Fairmount. But at the Dew Drop Inn, only Bunchie is out on the stoop, looking none too good herself.

“Fran in bed,” she says. “Andre gone to school.”

School? DeAndre? Lord, please, what are the chances of that? Gary stumbles on, heading down Gilmor without any real plan, the snake now coiling and uncoiling in his throat. He goes around the block and turns toward Fayette, defeated, moving through the crowd at Mount Street, looking into the eyes of a half-dozen regulars who have already made their shot. By now, he’s unable to gather his wits, to endure the snake long enough to manufacture a hustle.

“Hey, hey,” a voice calls.

Gary looks up to see a face, vaguely familiar, smiling at him from the other side of Mount Street.

“What’s up with you?”

Gary squints, trying to focus. Now he’s got it. The guy from Stevie’s room. The fiend who’s been shuffling in and out of Dew Drop Inn for about a month now, firing with half a dozen others in Stevie Boyd’s rogues’ gallery. Doug, remembers Gary. Name is Douglas for sure.

Gary crosses the street.

“Nothin’ yet,” he tells Doug.

“Man,” says Doug, taking stock, “you looking flat-out rough.”

Gary nods agreement. “I feel bad. Can’t get started.”

“No, hey, I can hook you up with something,” says Doug. “I got somethin’ goin’ on.”

Gary takes this in. Doug is going to get him over. Doug, who hasn’t done anything but use the same shooting gallery. Gary nods agreement, hopeful, but waiting for the shoe to drop.

“Found this spot,” says Doug. “They practically asking you to take their shit. I’m serious. This one store out on Forty West been keeping me well all week.”

Gary nods. He can do it. He can do anything if the snake goes back down into its hole. And Doug understands. He’ll get Gary the jumper: twenty on the hype, free of charge, so long as they share the caper. To Gary’s ears, it’s burning bush time, with Yahweh himself shouting out to him from the unconsuming flames.

I’m up for it, Gary thinks. I’m up for anything.

An hour and a half later, he’s stepping off the Route 40 bus out near Westview, walking around the county like a damn puppy at Doug’s heels. He’s out of his game now, stumbling through the shopping mall doors, still trying to fight the snake because Doug’s twenty wasn’t much.

“We go in separate-like,” Doug tells him outside the J.C. Penney. “You follow me up the escalator where they got this shelf of irons. You the lookout, I scoop. Nothing to it, my man.”

Gary just nods. Yeah. Lookout. Look out for what?

In they go and Gary looks around, trying to spot security guards from among the customers but not at all sure of what he’s seeing. Doug’s out in front, hellbent for the steam irons. Gary watches his partner sidle up to the display, watches as Doug comes out with a worn Penney’s shopping bag. One, then two, three, four, five, six. Gary’s on the other side of the aisle, fidgeting, looking around frantically for the handcuffs sure to come. But no, everyone on the floor is oblivious.

He follows Doug out the side entrance and into the parking lot, thinking, that they’re both invisible. A couple of raggedy-ass, dope-eyed black men stumbling through a county shopping center, lifting appliances, and we’re flat-out invisible. We just walk in and take what we want.

“See?” says Doug. “Nothin’ to it.”

A fine caper, and Gary is proud, the high of their success pushing the reptile deeper in his belly. At the bus stop, Doug intrudes on his reverie, wondering where they can off the merchandise. “Been dumpin’ a lot of irons on Fayette,” he says apologetically.

For that, Gary’s got a plan of his own, a contribution to the cause greater than that of a mere lookout. With real delight, he tells Doug where the irons are going and who will be paying for them.

“Say what?”

Gary nods, smiling wickedly.

“The police gonna buy our irons,” says Doug, doubtful.

“Yes indeed.”

Which is pretty much what happens when the two of them get back to the city and find the right corner bar at Baltimore and Smallwood Streets, a place that Gary knows is a hangout for off-duty police. For good retail items, Gary has used the bar before, learning that the rollers, like everyone else, love a discount. Just like that, three of the irons are gone; ten dollars each and everyone’s happy, no questions asked. Doug
is impressed, even more so after they walk back up the hill and Gary goes salesman on the workers building the new wing at Bon Secours, unloading two more irons on the hard hats.

Cash money. They head back for Mount and Fayette and Gary’s mind is spinning with the glory of the caper, oblivious to the cold, indifferent even to the snake itself. It’s all the better because he made it happen without Ronnie. Now he’s thinking that Ronnie isn’t much, that he can cut her loose. At Mount Street, they jump into the action like new shooters at a crap table.

“Who got those Black-and-Whites?” Gary asks. Tallyho.

The next day, they’re together again, county-bound, riding the MTA out to the same stop, giddy at the possibilities. Doug talks like a broken record, offering up the same plan. Gary shows no concern, because what the hell, they’re invisible. Same spot, same shelf—Doug hits the irons while Gary stands around like some kind of referee. One, two, three, four—then Doug stops, probably figuring there isn’t much of a steam iron display left. This time Gary is out the door first, crossing the promenade, then turning to wait for his partner.

But no Doug.

Gary waits, then walks back to the entrance, close enough to catch a glimpse of Doug being led off by two security guards. He feels his stomach roll, his mind racing. Got to think. Got to think on this. The guards walk Doug away, back to the security office, but no one comes for Gary. He wanders down the promenade, retrieves a newspaper from a trash can, then takes a seat on a bench, hiding behind the sports section with no real plan. Panic steals his high.

Ten minutes later, Gary is still there when three security guards suddenly appear, blocking him against the bench.

“Come with us.”

“I wouldn’t do … I wasn’t with …”

Gary’s protest is weak and he knows it; his ability to carry a lie is the poorest part of his game. In the security office, he’s reunited with Doug, who gives him a guilty look. They’re left to sit there in silence while papers are shuffled and bodies move around them. Watching it all from within the fog, Gary is dazzled by a voice, businesslike and droning, then a hand extending papers. Gary, clueless, takes the pen and signs away, then waits some more until the county police arrive and he’s in the back of a police wagon for the short run to the Wilkens lockup. There, he sits in a common holding area, wondering when he might see
a court commissioner, and bargaining with the snake, trying to figure some way to make peace with the animal inside.

He’s the very picture of abject poverty, at least until some tattooed white boy walks over, lifts his shirt, and tugs at an Ace bandage wrapped around his ribs. Three bags of dope fall to the ground and the white boy laughs at the expression on Gary’s face.

He picks up one of the glassine bags and looks over in gratitude; the white boy seems Christlike, feeding the multitudes. No spike, so Gary breathes it deep into one nostril, then leans back to hear the white boy’s laughter and feel the snake backing away.

A few minutes later, they give him his call. Gary handles the receiver gingerly, dreading the answer at the other end. He’s causing pain they don’t deserve, but he has to get out.

“Ma … yeah, Ma,” he says. “I’m locked up … Out in the county, Ma. They got me locked up.”

He winces visibly at his mother’s voice, seeing her sagging down at the kitchen table, imagining the prayers running around her head. He tells the tale haltingly, painting himself a victim. Miss Roberta listens to a story that Gary hears as feeble even as he tells it. Finally, she cuts him off:

“Gary, what were you doing out there in the first place?”

He doesn’t have an answer.

“Oh Gary.”

She promises to call his brother Ricardo, who is now off the corner and doing all right for himself, making money down at the crabhouse and on a second job out at Social Security. Cardy might help, but beyond that she can’t promise, telling Gary that money is tight, that she’ll talk to his father when he gets home. Gary hears that and swallows hard.

“Ma, please,” says Gary. He’s begging finally, promising to change, get off the drugs, maybe get back his old job at the Point and do all the things he used to do. “Ma, I’m gonna make it up to you, I promise.”

His mother reaches Ricardo, scrapes up the money and finds a bondsman, but Gary gets the bad news when he’s pulled out of the bullpen in the afternoon: He can’t be released by the county; he has a detainer from Baltimore city.

An old assault warrant, the turnkey explains. Gary tries to remember. Assault? Who? He didn’t assault anyone. It doesn’t register until he meets the city fugitive detective, thumbing his way through the paperwork.

“Says here, you hit, ah, Veronica Boice.”

Ronnie’s revenge. Her trumped-up humble of an assault charge from when Gary cut her out of a blast. Dag.

The next ride takes him downtown. It’s Gary’s first trip to the city jail, that tiered nightmare at the city detention center and state penitentiary complex on Eager Street. He’s out of his depth and he knows it.

In the intake area, he unwinds slowly, his eyes trying to adjust. He’s in a barred confine littered with maybe a dozen men—some white strays, but mostly black—being processed in and out of the facility. From behind a screen, a lieutenant pulls his paperwork, takes his thumbprint, and points him in the general direction of the bullpen. It’s eighty bodies deep, a murmuring, stinking mob squeezed around a single metal toilet.

Gary struggles for space, eventually squeezing into a spot along one wall. He slumps down, tuning out the noise, eyes capturing a verse or two lifted from Isaiah, another fragment of raging prophesy about sin and redemption. He’s barely digested that much when the guards send them out on the tier, into J-section, where a coterie of broke-down oldtime hustlers share space with some of the younger souls. Gary draws an old white gunner from South Baltimore as a cellmate, a veteran who has been jailing for years, who knows to keep a low profile.

Soon enough, Gary knows it, too. He quickly gets a sense of the sharks, the kind you want to keep from, especially the crazed one in the cell directly across from him. Banging the bars, eyefucking anything that moves, the neighbor across the way spends the time talking to no one in particular, telling the world just how bad he is. Beyond him, though, J-section seems pretty tame.

Next morning, they let them out on the tier a half hour before breakfast for a chance to move around, maybe get to a telephone. Today, though, the sharks are making all the calls, so Gary heads off to the mess hall and a chance to look into that blue chain-linked sky along the way. Breakfast is two thick slices of bread, two packets of jelly, and a cold boiled egg. Gary throws it all together as a sandwich and forces it down. Then it’s back down the funnel and back into that cell. Twice more like that and he can call it a day.

He’s a novice here, jailing without a game face, genuinely incapable of the requisite brutality. No shank, no moves, no allies, no money, but he’s making it, discovering that the words of Islam he learned in an earlier life can be a key. In the afternoon of that first day, he joins the little prayer group that nestles in one cell, hearing the words, talking
the talk, giving it some meaning. The regulars are receptive; Gary is carving out a little niche, getting some breathing space and a chance at the phone. His mother promises that they’ll have a paid bail on the city charge soon. And, most important, an old-timer in the section comes through with pills that manage to hold the snake at bay.

A day more and Gary’s thinking he can be hard, like Gee or Drac or any of the corner gangsters. Hard like Ronnie, who can do a month in women’s detention standing on her head. Gary is showing them all up in his mind, showing them he can do what he has to, thinking these thoughts until the white boy shows up, a kid, really, but shaded a little too far toward suburban, with wispy blond hair. Anyone with a soul has to wince when they drop the kid in with the madman across the way.

The kid sits at one edge of the metal bunk and looks across the aisle at Gary, who tries to give back a reassuring smile. Night comes on with the lights dimmed, the noise muted. Gary closes his eyes, but night never brings real silence to Eager Street. Screams, sobs, cursing, laughter punctuate the hours; in jail, you cry at night—at least you do if you’re still capable of crying. After a time, Gary gives up trying to sleep and slides back against the wall, staring into the dimness. Passing time.

He catches a movement in the cell across the way. Gary thinks he sees the glint from a gold ring slicing through the air, smashing down into a sleeping form. He hears a whimper, then the ripping of fabric and flashes of white skin. And then, a shattering of sound, with the caged animal cursing over a piercing endless scream that banks off the bars and echoes down the tier. Something is tossed from the cell; Gary squints in the darkness until his eyes make out what looks like the bloody stub of a broken fluorescent tube.