The Corner (36 page)

And Ella has them three hours a day. Between three and six on weekdays, she can reward the good and punish the bad and try to make some kind of argument against the constant, grinding process that turns children into victims and victimizers. Against all the immediate evidence, she believes in those three hours.

Today, apart from Old Man and his paste and that ugly bit with Chubb and the liquor bottle, it’s a good session that ends with the Lorna Doones and pork rings issued one-to-a-customer, and Ella slumping, exhausted, at her desk. Still unsorted, the mail in front of her is mostly junk, much of it shopping circulars that catch Ella’s attention only when the Caldor or Woolworth ads feature children’s toys and games. She will now and then clip out an item or two, stuffing them into the top drawer of her desk in preparation for that come-and-get-it day when the Franklin Square budget is fat enough to replenish the rec’s toy chest.

Today’s catch of circulars is halfway to the plastic waste can when she spots a gray-white envelope jutting from beneath a newsprint shopper:

Miss Ella Thompson

Martin Luther King Recreation Center

100 Vincent Street

Baltimore, Maryland

Not an exact address, but close enough. The ink is smudged and Ella can’t really make out the letter’s return address, but from experience she knows this envelope’s point of origin. Jail mail, definitely, but the legible part of the return address is only a few digits of an inmate number and
a portion of the Eager Street address. She doesn’t know anyone down there, though her mind goes immediately to George Epps. But Blue is home now; Ella saw him on Monroe Street just this Saturday last and told him she wanted him back for art class. No, not Blue.

She looks again at her name on the envelope, and with some hesitation, finally opens it, half-convinced that the letter is intended for someone else. A name—Ricky Cunningham—is neatly printed on top. Ricky. She had wondered what happened to him after he ducked out of the Valentine’s dance, particularly since his promise to help out at the rec had seemed so direct and sincere.

The handwriting is tidy and compressed, the letter itself beginning with an apology.

“Ella, I know how much you counted on me to help with the basketball team …”

Halfway down the page, the letter turns a corner.

“It means so much to me to come around the center and be with you. You make me feel wanted again. You don’t know how much it hurts not seeing you …”

Ella is puzzled. Ricky had been to the center only a couple of times. How could that be so important to him? And why is he writing to her?

“… every day, I think about you …”

Ella reads on, and to her surprise, the letter becomes florid and romantic. She’s been remote from this kind of love for a while now, cautious around suitors and unwilling to risk whatever normalcy she’s managed to establish in her life. With her history, that much could be expected: Along Fayette Street, the stronger women, the survivors, inevitably come to realize that most of the men in their world aren’t very good at making life easier. Still, she’s floored by the idea of Ricky Cunningham cultivating a schoolboy crush from some jail tier.

The letter wanders to-and-fro, waxing on in its love and admiration for Ella and all she stands for, and then, on its final page, culminating in a plea for her to be there in court at sentencing. The crime itself is a small absurdity: Ricky was caught in a Rite-Aid, stealing a jar of vitamins. The store security guard was a girl he went to school with, and he figured that would count for something. Now, for about eight dollars worth of iron, calcium, and vitamin C, he’s been over at Eager Street for almost a month.

“I know it was wrong,” he writes. “Wrong and stupid.”

Ella folds the letter and walks back to her desk, trying to figure how
this, too, has been added to her collective burden. She meets a young man in the neighborhood, hoping that he might be of some help to the rec center, and a couple of months after that, he’s hoping, instead, for some help from her. The wearied portion of Ella’s soul tells her to put the letter back into its envelope and bury it somewhere. But the rest of that soul is too earnest, too Christian for such a careless gesture.

Three weeks later, she is perched on one of the back benches in a chamber of the Wabash Avenue district courthouse. She seems to be the lone taxpayer in that courtroom, the last true citizen amid the regular human barnacles on the benches. Bail reviews. A plea. Another plea. This case postponed, that one dismissed, the next one sent up to the circuit court for a jury trial. Bailiffs and lawyers, police and defendants—all of them moving through a brutish ballet, all of them stepping with the cold certainty of veterans.

She sits there, listening with half an ear to the play-by-play between the judge and the lawyers, watching with a vague but genuine regret as the docket is sorted and shifted. Petty things: drugs, thefts, violations of probation, more drugs. And then, finally, Ricky comes into the room from the side door, handcuffed, with an aging jail guard behind him. For a moment, the defendant’s attention is drawn to the judge and the lawyers, to the case numbers being read and the manila folders being passed. Then, as if sensing her, he turns around to scan the benches. Ella gives a little wave.

He sees it and breaks into a wide beam, then waves at her with manacled hands. The case—the schoolmate, the vitamins, the statement of charges, ridiculous in its simplicity—is read into the record by a young prosecutor. Then, the public defender begins to take up the outlines of an already agreed-upon plea.

But Ricky is hardly attending to this. He’s turning constantly to meet Ella’s eyes, his contortions distracting the proceedings.

“Thank you,” he says in a stage whisper.

Ella nods, feeling awkward.

She is on that bench because of someone in need, nothing more than that. But of course there’s no way to say any of this to Ricky, who can only mouth a few more thank-yous before being escorted through the side door. Ella goes back to her car and drives home; Ricky goes back to the jail van and heads downtown to finish a thirty-day bit.

Still, she is glad she went. Ricky is trying, and he’ll keep trying when he comes home; that, she tells herself, is what that letter was all about.
Her small part in the matter leaves her hopeful, filled once again with the conviction that what everyone does in this world will ultimately matter.

That same afternoon, before going down to the rec, she sits out on her front steps with a glass of tea, making the most of a beautiful spring day. And most of the time on the steps is just that—absolutely beautiful—with the sun warming the pavement, and the schoolchildren drifting slowly into the block, coming up the street from Steuart Hill Elementary after a halfday session.

This, too, is a small victory for Ella. Last summer, the overflow from the Family Affair and Diamond in the Raw crews found its way up Fayette Street, with touts and lookouts settling on the Fulton corners. Ella and a handful of neighbors spent weeks trying to push the crews back down the hill, calling the police on them so often that the Western District officers and Fayette Street slingers were, for once, in absolute agreement: The Thompson woman was a damned nuisance.

Now, with the vials trading hands a good half-block away, Ella watches the glint of the chrome as the cars roll past on Fulton, then hears the music-box jingle of the ice cream truck all the way at the top of the block.

“Hey, Miss Ella.”

“Hi, Dion.”

“Rec open today?”

“Three o’clock.”

She’s watching the neighborhood as Baltimore people have always watched the neighborhood, living life at the front steps of a rowhouse. And today, at least, it’s soothing the way it used to be, so right and fine that she can’t yet bring herself to go back inside and ready herself for the rec. Sipping her tea, she watches a young white girl, freckled and athletic, weaving up and down the 1700 block on her ten-speed. The girl just seems to be riding aimlessly, cruising the neighborhood with no set purpose, just out to soak up that good sunshine.

A few minutes later, Kiti comes in from Francis Woods, then goes right back out again looking for Preston and the rest of his crew. Then Ella’s grandchild, Tianna, pops out of the apartment, asking for help with a broken toy. When Ella looks up again, the Death Row touts and runners are chasing the white girl up Fayette, gaining as she struggles with the gears of her bike.

They catch her at Fulton, just in from the corner. They yank at the
handlebars and knock her to the ground. Two of the younger ones kick and grab at her until she rolls over and they can snatch at the edges of a glassine sandwich bag beneath her sweatshirt. The girl is bloody and crying, but the attack continues as she tries to cover the bag.

Ella watches it all from her steps with a feeling of utter helplessness. The touts finally liberate the baggie and its load of vials, carrying the stolen-for-a-moment ground stash back where it belongs. One of the young runners takes the ten-speed, declaring the bike as punitive damages. Business slowly returns to normal for the Fayette Street crews, though the white girl sits on a curb, crying and nursing her wounds.

Ella calls the police. After a long wait, a radio car pulls to the curb at Fulton and two officers pick up the white girl. Ella follows the petty drama to its conclusion, then files the episode with a hundred others in the far reaches of her mind. As the radio car rolls off, she also takes leave, going inside her apartment to heat up a macaroni-and-cheese lunch for her granddaughter. Tianna has been staying with Ella on weekdays while her mother, Donilla, works. The four-year-old is a joy and great company for Ella in the mornings. But at odd moments, she is reminded that Fayette Street is no place for any child.

“What are they doing outside?” Tianna asks.

“Who?”

“The police and the lady.”

“Nothing,” Ella tells her.

But how much can you ignore? Three days after the white girl is beaten for stealing a stash, the Martin Luther King Jr. Rec Center is itself burglarized. Suddenly, the menace is not just in the street among the corner players, but within the safehouses where Ella lives and breathes. And from what she gathers, the thieves knew their way around the cinder-block building, creeping into the back alley between the rear walls of the rec and one of the vacant Lexington Street houses. Once there, they knocked a plywood board from the outside of one of the small, high windows that had long ago been nailed and mortared shut, then kicked through the old brick, jumped down into the small library area, and grabbed the television and the VCR.

Ella herself discovers the mess late the following morning, after pulling up the grate to begin her day. The police are called for no apparent purpose other than the creation of a police report. This time, the responding officer happens to be named Huffham. Ella greets him at
the door, talks it through for him, then volunteers to share her desk as he goes to work on his incident report. When his writing hand tires, Huffham pauses to take in the clutter of the rec office.

“That list,” he says at one point, looking at a phone list for the rec center basketball team. “What’s that about?”

“That’s our team,” says Ella, with some pride. “That’s going to be the basketball team for the older boys.”

“DeAndre McCullough,” says the officer, reading from the list. “Him I know.”

Ella looks up sadly. Huffham goes on, a bit embarrassed, perhaps, for Ella’s sake. “I, ah, I locked him up a few months back,” says Huffham, trying for a tone of casual conversation. “Got him for distribution down on Fairmount.”

Ella says nothing.

“DeAndre’s a smart kid,” Huffham adds.

Ella nods politely.

“I’m serious,” Huffham says, finishing up the report. “He’s a very smart kid.”

“Yes,” says Ella. “He is.”

“Well,” adds Huffham, gathering up the paperwork. “I hope you get a chance to straighten him out.”

Later that day, Myrtle Summers sends over a workman to board up the gaping hole in the alley wall, but the theft of the television and tape player isn’t so easily repaired. The rec has a high insurance deductible and no rainy-day money to make good the loss, and so the Friday night movies—featuring rentals from the Route 40 Blockbuster—come to an abrupt end. The older boys are dismayed and there is some early talk about tracking down the culprits and exacting retribution. Word from the corners is that Dink-Dink, Eric, and Lamont might have had something to do with the theft, that they were seen down on Baltimore Street trying to sell a television.

“That shit ain’t right,” Tae declares.

But in the end, nothing much comes of it. The boys vent their indignation and move on to new business, uneasy about the notion of playing detective and confronting Dink-Dink or anyone else with C.M.B. credentials. The police don’t call back. The Baltimore Street pawnshops ask no questions. About the burglary of its recreation center, the neighborhood speaks only in silences.

* * *

Fat Curt and Hungry stumble up Vine from Fulton Avenue, both acknowledging June Bey McCullough with a quick nod.

“Wassup, wassup,” shouts June Bey.

Hungry smiles. Curt looks over at June Bey and wonders the same thing. June Bey is standing amid a huge pile of fetid trash, broken bricks, and shattered furniture, sorting it as if it was somehow important to know the contents of the pile. Just in front of June Bey, in one of the open garages across from the McCullough home, is more of the same. It seems as if trash has been accumulating in the Vine Street garages since before the Earth cooled.

“Man,” says Curt, “what the hell you lookin’ for?”

June Bey laughs.

“You lose your stash again?”

June Bey shakes his head. “Cleaning,” he says.

The tout ponders this for a moment, reasons quite correctly that there isn’t a dollar’s profit in cleaning a vacant garage on Vine Street, and wanders up to Blue’s, shaking his head. Hungry follows him as he slips through the broken back door. June Bey watches them go, and, sensing that they are flush and ready to load up, he feels his lips go dry.