The Corner (22 page)

“We were shit,” mutters Dewayne, wounded by the score.

“You were shit,” says Manny Man, correcting him. “I ain’t played but a minute.”

“You were shit for that minute,” R.C. assures him.

“C’mon, Tae,” pleads Manny Man, “put me in.”

Tae figures there isn’t anything wrong with the C.M.B. game that Manny can fix. He goes with the lineup that started the game. R.C. rolls his eyes at the mention of Brooks.

“Take Brooks out,” he says bluntly. Brooks scowls, R.C. shoves him out of the team huddle, but Tae stays with his starters. The third quarter proves no different, with Bentalou substituting for their starters and still managing a twenty-six-point lead. On defense, R.C. holds his man to a single bucket and at the same time controls the boards; on offense, he’s trapped and useless in the low post, forever dependent on an attack in which passing is anathema. In the last quarter, when Brooks launches another graceless, out-of-range jumper, R.C. finally explodes. Tae orders Brooks to the bench, and Brooks responds by ripping off his jersey and tossing it onto the court.

“Y’all can suck my dick.”

Herman Jones, doubling as referee, calls the technical.

“Brooks,” yells R.C. “Get off the damn court.”

The smaller boy turns to confront his tormentor, his face bent into
an ugly snarl, his eyes at the verge of tears. R.C. shoves him toward the bench.

“Motherfucker,” shouts Brooks.

Double technical, and the Bentalou guard hits both foul shots to end the quarter. Brooks leaves the gym and the game lurches forward, with the team actually showing small flashes of poise at the end. Linwood, stoic amid the wreckage, has been cherry-picking on the offensive boards, putting up a quiet eighteen points from inside the paint. Tae manages to pick off two cross-court passes, turning them into layups. Even R.C. endures long enough to gather in a no-look dish-off from Dewayne and power up for a three-point play. In a last-minute flurry of competence, they lose by only fourteen.

R.C. keeps his own box score in his head, tallying it all up as if there’s some posterity attached to a nonleague city rec game.

“I had seven,” he calculates, sliding out of the gymnasium doors. “Four assists and ten rebounds. Three for five from the field and I hit my only foul shot.”

For some, the game is nothing more than an evening’s entertainment. But for Richard Carter, it’s more than that; for him, basketball is life itself. And in her own corner of the gym, Ella, too, manages to see more in this event than a badly played basketball game.

Never mind the need for a coach. Never mind the score. Never mind that Brooks is scowling somewhere outside the Bentalou gym, gripping an empty soda bottle, hoping for the chance to toss it at R.C.’ s head. All in all, she counts tonight a success. Her rec center now has a plan for the older boys.

For the younger children, too, she has made some progress in the last month, notably in the creation of an organized arts and crafts program with none other than George Epps at the helm.

Blue’s involvement was a surprising turn of events, having as much to do with his state of mind as with Ella’s constant appeals. At the end of January, Blue simply manifested himself on the rec center doorstep, looking sheepish and ill at ease, swaying a bit on the back of his heels, but not over-the-top blasted either.

Ella sensed the trepidation and hustled him inside quickly. She pulled out the finger paints and the construction paper and everything else in the arts and crafts corner. Blue scanned the inventory and Ella gave the idea her strongest sell, but she could tell he was still on the fence.

“They love this,” she assured him. “They love art.”

“Yeah, well, this is good. This is good,” Blue offered. “You know, we’ll see how it goes.”

“You’ll be great, Blue.”

“I don’t know, Ella. It’s been, you know, it’s been a while for me and … well, you know, there’s the thing …”

But Ella wasn’t hearing it. Blue had crossed the threshold; he was inside the rec center, the only place in the neighborhood where Ella’s word is the last one. Slowly, methodically, she brought him around.

“Okay, Ella. We’ll give it a try, you know, see how it goes. So, ah, when … when would be best to …”

Ella didn’t hesitate: “Why not today.”

“Today?”

Blue was caught. He came back that afternoon, scratching his beard nervously as Ella passed out drawing paper and crayons to the little ones.

“Today,” she told them, “is going to be different because today we’re going to have an art class with a real artist. Mr. Blue paints and draws and he lives in your neighborhood.”

Blue edged forward, tentative.

“Okay. Okay then,” he said, looking down at crayon works-in-progress.

“That’s very good. That’s very nice.”

He dropped his satchel, removed his Army coat, and managed one deep breath before launching himself. “Okay,” he said again, sitting at the center table, using one of the small-kid chairs. “Okay, who knows what art is?”

Charday raised her hand. “A painting,” she said.

“Uh huh. A painting is art.”

“A drawing,” said Umeka.

“Uh huh, right,” said Blue. “But art can be a lot of things, can’t it? It can be a sculpture, or a song, or a poem, or just about anything, really. Art can really be whatever you want it to be.”

Ella heard it all from the back office, delighted. Awkward at first, Blue grew more comfortable with every sentence, though there was a vagueness hanging on him, a hesitance born of drug corner rhythms. Twice, Ella had to get up to quiet the older boys who were hanging in the front of the rec. But each time, as she turned back toward her office, she saw the faces of the littlest ones, captivated by the presence of George Epps.

“What’s that?” asked Blue, looking over Michael’s drawing.

“That’s the Hulk,” the boy told him. “He killing somebody.”

“Huh,” said Blue. “Well, that’s art, too.”

That was the beginning of professional art instruction at the rec center. The end came a week and a half later, when George Epps put Rita Hale out of the shooting gallery only to be arrested and charged with burglarizing his own house.

Still, Ella regarded that as only a modest setback. Blue would come home soon enough, she reasoned, and then his good work as an art teacher would surely resume. Until then, Marzell Myers would keep the weekly sessions going.

With the rec center, Ella had learned to measure progress in halfway-there increments, to look for partial victories in any battle. Stable volunteers, involved parents, a sufficient operating budget—these things were the suburban ideal, the raw materials for well-tended childhoods in places other than Fayette Street. For the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center, there was no reservoir of commitment from the surrounding community, nothing save for the strays, like Blue or House, who might stumble off a corner and into the lives of Ella’s children. And Ella, who knew this, learned to credit any stray willing to walk through the rec doors.

A few days after the Bentalou game, Ella is dessed in black yet again for a neighbor’s son, a man dead from the virus after years on the corner. She leaves the services at Brown’s on Baltimore Street in the company of two other men she has made part of her life. The first, Ike Motley, sings a hymn at many of the Fayette Street rites and Ella knows him well. Last month, Ike was singing for Linda Taylor, the next-door neighbor to the McCullough family on Vine Street, laid out at Brown’s after a long fight with the Bug. Today, he sang for Edward Hicks, a casualty at forty-seven. Next week, he’ll be back for some other corner soldier with whom he shared a childhood. Like Ella, Ike has become a fixture at funerals, his hymn a set piece in West Baltimore’s accelerating cycle of grief.

“That was a beautiful song today,” she tells him at the chapel door.

“Thank you, Ella,” Ike says quietly, turning away on the steps of the funeral home. “You take care now.”

“You, too.”

Her second escort, a lanky, dark-skinned young man in a leather coat, nods an awkward good-bye to Ike, then follows Ella down Baltimore Street to Monroe.

“Still want me to come to that dance?” he asks.

“We’d love to have you, Ricky,” she assures him. “We need some chaperones.”

Ricky Cunningham is another man on the fence, caught halfway between community and corner. His sister, Gale, is on Monroe Street touting. He’s living down near the projects, dabbling with it, disgusted at his inability to stop. A year ago, he had a good job cutting meat down at Lexington Market, but lost it after he took a charge behind this nonsense. For Ricky, Ella is the promise of new things; he looks at her and follows her from the funeral in a way reminiscent of adolescent love.

“I be there, Ella. Most definitely, I be there.”

They turn the corner together and look up Monroe. Ricky seems to stiffen suddenly, unnerved by the site of clustered police cars blocking the intersection with Fayette Street.

“Somethin’ up,” he says.

A crowd is packed onto three corners; the fourth is empty, ribbon-wrapped in yellow police-line tape.

As the two make their way up from Baltimore Street, the scene slowly unfolds: the blood pool on the sidewalk near the liquor store; the detectives leaning against a radio car, arms crossed; the police lab technician, crouching low to the pavement, snapping off camera shoots. And the crowd—the complete inventory of the neighborhood corners from Monroe to Gilmor—all of them there to see the show. From teenaged slingers to dying touts, they mingle as if it were some hellish cocktail party.

In front of the the carryout at Fayette, Ricky pulls away from Ella and huddles for a moment with his sister and Smitty, her boyfriend.

“Bryan,” he says, coming back to Ella.

She can’t place the name.

“Tall Bryan,” says Ricky, holding his hand a few inches above his own forehead. “Bryan who’s always getting shot. He was burnin’ people, stickin’ people up and all …”

Ella shakes her head sadly at information for which she has no real use. “It makes no sense,” she offers.

“You know, Bryan who …”

Ricky pauses, sees the vague expression on Ella’s face, then shuts down, intuiting, perhaps, some unspoken mark against him for sharing in the corner’s secrets. Bryan’s name, why Bryan got shot—all of it is guilty knowledge of a kind, evidence that Ricky pretends to one world while living in another.

“Well,” she says, “I guess I’ll see you on Friday then.”

Ricky nods, pausing halfway across the street. “Friday,” he repeats, smiling. “I be there.”

If not House, then Blue. If not Blue, then Ricky. If not Ricky, then maybe R.C.’ s older brother, who made some noises the other day about maybe coaching basketball. Ella believes in her strays, waits on them. She watches Ricky drift away, then crosses to the other side of Fayette, where one of the detectives is shouting at June Bey McCullough for stumbling through the crime scene unawares.

Ella steps past the argument, stops at her apartment to change, and then heads down to the rec, where the business at hand is a Valentine’s Day sock hop planned for Friday night. That leaves Ella with three days to transform her bunker of a rec center with red and white ballons, ribbons, hot dogs, punch, and candy. She’s looking for a rare chemistry on Fayette Street, a magic that can beguile fifteen-year-old drug traffickers and fourteen-year-old mothers-to-be into accepting and enjoying an unlikely moment or two of shared innocence.

But come seven o’clock on Friday, only a few of the prepubescent girls show up to stand around the food tables while the chaperones—Ella, Marzell, and Joyce Smith of the Franklin Square neighborhood association—watch the door and wonder if the two-dollar admission fee might keep the older ones away. Ricky Cunningham, too, arrives to chaperone, then leaves for a time, his eyes showing a telltale glaze when he returns a half hour later. Ella senses this, but greets him warmly nonetheless.

“Oh Ricky,” Ella teases. “You’re in for it tonight.”

Ricky struggles with a response.

“This is a rough crew we’re dealing with,” she says, laughing. “And we’re going to have more than this. Otherwise the chaperones are going to outnumber the kids.”

Ricky nods. He stations himself against the far wall, arms crossed, watching Ella watching the door.

Three of the older girls—Neacey, Gandy, and Shaneka—finally show up and follow Ella’s rules for the dance, leaving their shoes at the door. They run through a few well-rehearsed dance routines, giggling at their mistakes and working out a handful of new steps. They laugh uproariously at every new move.

It’s almost eight before most of the C.M.B. contingent wanders in. Tae, Manny Man, Dinky, Dorian, and Brian—but not R.C. and not
DeAndre, who, Ella has learned, will spend the weekend at Boys Village before getting a juvenile hearing. Each is reluctant to part with the price of admission, each argues about having to leave his high-tops at the door. DeAndre’s girl, Tyreeka, starts to follow them inside, but when she hears about the socks-only rule, she runs home for a clean pair.

It’s slow going at first, slow as any teenage dance always is—the boys looking uncomfortable in one corner of the room, the girls, across the floor, dancing with each other, glancing over their shoulders at every loud laugh or shout. Kiti has his sound system set up in the far corner and he stays shy and aloof behind the turntables, keeping the dance mix going. There are a few forays to the dance floor by a couple or two, but most end in childish laughter.

It’s amazing really, considering the range of their sexual experience. Perhaps it’s the colored balloons and candies, or perhaps it’s Ella’s presence that has the boys subdued, sitting in a row against the front wall, goofing with each other, Manny goading Tae to dance with Neacey or Shaneka. Suddenly, they’re children again; nervous, excited, and only marginally competent to deal with the matter at hand. Somehow, the jaded sexuality has been dispensed with; the sordid histories forgotten. The adventures with that freak girl in Manny Man’s apartment, the blow jobs from the hollow-eyed pipers down below McHenry Street—none of it stands with the fumbling modesty now on display.