The Corner (31 page)

The sons stare vacantly, or clown with kids they haven’t seen since middle school, or maybe even throw out an eyefuck or two for the benefit of some member of a rival crew. The mothers wait with that as-long-as-it-takes look stenciled to their faces, knowing nothing about the process save for its eventual outcome. Today the government has a leasehold on their lives, but they sense that after all is said and done, tomorrow will be just about the same. Arrests and summonses, juvenile intake workers and lawyers, probation officers and masters—a fine facsimile of the grown-up pretense of crime and punishment. Fran listens to the mother next to her on the bench, a woman not much older than herself complaining about a daughter who won’t be disciplined, who beats on
her when she tries. “I’m frightened,” the woman admits, her daughter now down the hall and out of earshot. “I’m frightened of these childrens today.”

“These younger ones jus’ don’ care,” agrees another.

“They can take my child from me, I wouldn’t have no problem,” the woman says. “I can’t control her no ways.”

Three hours creep by on these benches before the word comes down that the masters have broken for lunch. Fran goes outside and brings back Newports and barbecued potato chips. It’s an hour beyond that before DeAndre hears his name.

“Are you the mother?” a pretrial worker asks Fran.

“Hmm,” says Fran.

“Come with me.”

They’re taken to a side office, where DeAndre is interviewed briefly about the charges. Stolen auto. Cocaine possesion with intent. And cocaine with intent a second time.

“Wasn’t me in the car,” he mumbles.

The pretrial worker makes a brief note and asks about the drug charges. DeAndre shrugs, then mutters something about the police finding the vials in the street and giving them to him.

“Why you?”

DeAndre shrugs.

“The police on the one charge got shot,” says Fran, interjecting. The pretrial worker looks at her curiously until Fran explains that the arresting officer got killed in a shooting a month or so later.

“That charge dead,” says DeAndre confidently.

The worker asks a few more questions, then sends them back to the benches. Twenty minutes later, they’re called down to Master Sampson’s chambers, a generous term for his shrunken imitation of a courtroom. Mother and son are directed to a pair of side benches, where they watch two other teenaged boys have their turn. The prosecutors are both young women, white and professional; the public defender is older, white, and rumpled, his glasses low on his nose, his white hair matted back into a comical cowlick. The juvenile master is a black man, middle-aged, well-dressed, and imperious. The foursome, joined by a clerk, spend ten minutes speaking in case numbers and shuffling files back and forth across two tables wedged hard against the slight rise of the bench.

Finally they locate a file and bend to the business at hand: a thirteen-year-old boy caught with a hundred bags. And caught isn’t the word for
it. The kid got turned in by his own mother, who’s right there on the bench next to Fran.

DeAndre rolls his eyes at the statement of charges.

“Damn,” whispers Fran.

“A hundert bags,” says DeAndre softly. “He goin’ away.”

Instead the master remands the boy to his mother’s custody, placing him on indefinite supervised probation. The case is resolved in minutes, without even a nod toward moral discussion or remonstrance. DeAndre is incredulous.

“Nigga got to be snitchin’,” he tells Fran. “That much dope and he gets probation. Puh-leeze.”

The next kid is called to the bench, represented this time by a different public defender, and Andre and Fran both lean forward, genuinely curious as the prosecutor begins reading a statement of charges. Cocaine this time. But DeAndre doesn’t get a chance to see how it plays out.

“Mr. McCullough.”

DeAndre looks up to see the rumpled defender gesturing toward the hallway. The old man stops in the doorway, and then, almost as an afterthought, gestures to Fran as well.

“You, too, mother. You should hear this too.”

Without a moment of confrontation for DeAndre McCullough, a deal has been brokered on the three separate charges. The two drug violations—of which DeAndre is decidedly guilty—will be dropped. The stolen car charge will stand. As a first conviction, he’ll get a year’s probation, with the vague and implausible requirement that he make some restitution to the woman whose car was taken and damaged.

“Is that okay with you?”

DeAndre looks at Fran, barely able to stifle a smile.

“Mother?”

Fran nods, but a moment later, she’s thinking twice about the terms of the deal. She’s wondering whether the deal will keep him monitored, or whether the probation will be unsupervised. She wants to say something, maybe talk to the lawyer privately, without DeAndre hearing what she has to say. But the lawyer is back inside the master’s chambers and Fran says nothing else. A minute or two more and the clerk chants her son’s name, followed by a string of juvenile case numbers. The prosecutor acknowledges the dismissal of the two drug cases, then reads a brief statement of facts regarding the car theft. The statement has DeAndre being arrested in the stolen auto, although in fact, he was locked up days later.

DeAndre looks over at Fran, then at his lawyer, confused.

“I …”

The public defender leans over.

“I wasn’t in the car.”

Now it’s the lawyer who’s confused. The juvenile master, too, seems to sense the young man’s trepidation. He questions DeAndre carefully about the plea agreement. Are you pleading guilty because you are guilty? The rush of activity in the chamber seems to lapse for a moment as DeAndre struggles with it.

“Um.”

“Because by pleading guilty …”

DeAndre was in the car. He knew it was stolen. But the statement of facts is wrong and DeAndre is vaguely upset that he’s caught on a lie. The first coke charge? Guilty as sin, but it’s being dismissed because the police got killed. The second charge on Fairmount? Guilty again, but that case is being dropped without any argument at all. And then this car charge, where the evidence is exaggerated and guilt is a prearranged deal.

“You are giving up your rights …”

As the master drones on about the rights forfeited under a plea agreement, DeAndre looks at his mother. This is his first encounter with the judicial system, and he is being taught luck-of-the-draw, nothing more.

“Yes,” says Andre, interrupting.

“Yes, what?” asks the master.

“Yes. I’m guilty.”

With that minor obstacle removed, there is only the race to finish. Master Sampson gives him a year’s supervised probation, then peers out over top of his glasses, managing a few moments of righteous intimidation.

“… and I don’t want to see you in here again or you will be dealing with all of these charges.”

DeAndre nods.

“Do you understand me?”

A weak mumble.

“What was that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right then.”

From the side bench, Fran stands up suddenly, half raising her hand to get the master’s attention.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Is this probation … Can you make it part of his probation that he has to go to school?”

DeAndre gives his mother a withering look. Fran, too, seems unsure where to go with this. The code of parenting on Fayette Street says that you stand with your children against any and all interventions; that, at least, is the standard Fran has always known. But just a moment ago, there was that mother who turned in her kid and a hundred bags.

“He’s not going to school?” asks the master.

“He has been lately, with the probation and all, he was easier to deal with and …”

“Are you saying that you’ve been having problems controlling him? Are there problems at home?”

DeAndre stares sullenly at his mother. Fran is caught. She wants him to get the deal; she doesn’t want him back at Boys Village. But she’d also like some leverage, and now, with the master leaning on her, she can’t think of any way to ask for one thing without risking the other.

“No,” she says, “no trouble.”

“I can’t make him go to school,” the master says. “But he knows what it is he’s supposed to be doing.”

Fran sits back down and waits for the clerk to complete the paperwork. Supervised probation it will be, meaning a trip to see a juvenile P.O. once a week, coupled with an occasional home visit. By the time they leave, DeAndre is so delighted to be back on Fayette Street that he’s even forgiven his mother’s betrayal.

“That wasn’t nuthin’,” he tells her.

“That’s what you say now,” Fran snaps back. “But you was a scared little boy in front of that judge.”

“I was,” DeAndre admits, laughing. “He made me nervous. I ain’t about to come back in his court.”

In the weeks afterward, DeAndre seems to hold to that thought. His attendance at school becomes a little more sporadic now that his probation officer isn’t counting, but he’s staying off the corner. Fran can tell because he keeps crying the blues about his damn Easter outfit. Without cash money, he’s leaning hard on Fran, and in a strange way, that gives her some pride.

It’s the old DeAndre talking, she tells herself. My child, my son. And while she can always go boosting in the malls to get him some Easter clothes, she understands that to keep things right with DeAndre she’ll
need more than that. If she could detox, she would be there for him, although the thought itself is intimidating. Fran hasn’t been clean and sober for a good fifteen years and now, she’s got nothing to speak of—just some old furniture piled up in the basement of the Dew Drop and $180 a month on check day. She’s got a medical assistance card, which grants no coverage for drug detox, so that means a long wait for a government-money rehab bed. She’s got some boosting charges coming up in the city and two counties, any one of which might land her in jail. And she has that second-floor bedroom, where nothing that she ever acquires or accumulates will be safe from anyone else. That much is evident two days after DeAndre comes home from court, when Fran makes the mistake of buying more than a day’s portion of tuna fish, bread, and mayo at the Korean grocery. She uses about half to make sandwiches for DeRodd and DeAndre, then puts the rest in the refrigerator for the next day. But there are no next days on Fayette Street. By morning, every last crumb is gone.

This, she tells herself, is no way to live. Even heroin no longer suffices to obscure the daily insult that her life has become. Day after day, she talks to herself about changing, and then, at the very thought of what such a thing would require, she talks herself right back onto the corner.

On the first day of April, she’s out on the stoop, same as she ever was, watching the check-day traffic at Mount and Fayette. After a time, Mike Ellerbee cruises up. This is the same Little Mike who was a regular gangster on these corners, slinging coke and shooting people when needed. Little Mike, who shot Joe Laney in the back that one time, who would’ve killed Joe if he hadn’t run out of bullets, who shot that other stickup boy not even a year back, and, by Fran’s reckoning, should still be locked up behind that charge.

“Hey, Fran.”

“How you?”

“I’m goin’ to sea.”

Fran looks at him as if he’d declared himself an astronaut. Mike has supervised probation and ten years suspended hanging over him from the last shooting; he’s not going anywhere.

“You goin’ where?”

“I’m gonna get on a ship. Soon as I get my Z-card.”

“Huh?”

“My Z-card and a physical. I get that from the Coast Guard and I’ll be gone. Ricky and Bug helped me get in the union.”

R.C.’ s older stepbrothers, now more off the corners than on, were members of the seafarer’s local. And the first part of Mike’s story, when he tells it, rings true to Fran. He explains that despite his criminal record, Ricky and Bug paid the right people to get him into the union. For Mike, this is a last chance. If he stays on Fayette Street, he’ll surely sling drugs, and he’ll just as surely end up shooting the next fiend who tries to rob him. Mike has too much heart not to shoot. That or he’ll take a drug charge; either way, he’ll go back to Judge Johnson at Circuit Court to get banged with the whole ten years.

As to the rest of story, though, Fran is skeptical.

“You gonna be able to get on a ship when you on probation?”

“I’m gonna talk with the judge.”

Fran nods, not buying it. No way, she thinks. No one here gets out alive.

“So you gonna be a sailor?”

Mike smiles broadly.

“You ever been on a ship before?”

“No. But they gonna teach me.”

“Hmm.”

Later that same day, she’s down in the basement of the Dew Drop, her face hovering over lines on a mirror. But this time it isn’t Bunchie down there with her, it’s Gary, who has brought some vials for old time’s sake.

“You know Mike?” she says abruptly.

Gary nods.

“He gonna go to sea.”

“Who?”

“Little Mike. Mike Ellerbee. He goin’ to sail the seas.”

She smirks as she says it, wanting not to believe. But Gary is rubbing his chin, accepting it on its face the way Gary does everything. It’s another one of the things she hates about Gary—his way of taking everything from the Koran to the
Wall Street Journal
as absolute gospel.

“He say he goin’ to join the union.”

“I thought he was in jail,” says Gary.

“He got probation for shooting that boy.”

“Dag.”

A silence comes over them and for once even Gary has trouble filling it. He looks around the Dew Drop basement at the last relics of their dream home: the glass dining room set, some end tables, two dressers, an old mattress and box spring, even some battered stereo components.
Fran watches Gary as he silently calculates the value of each item in Baltimore Street secondhand-store dollars, but she knows it’s an abstract exercise. He can’t steal from her.

“You still got our things.”

“Ain’t too much left,” she says, her eyes following his to the front of the room. Gary says nothing.

“We had it, didn’t we,” she laughs. “We were a team.”