The Corner (55 page)

A stickup boy is shot down in daylight at the mouth of the Vine Street alley. An argument over a short package leaves a Mount Street dealer cut in the side of the head and a tout on the run. A white boy is robbed and shot crossing Baltimore Street. On Saratoga, the police are called to a rowhouse and find the bodies of two women shot to death. The house has been ransacked; word on the corners is that a package of raw coke was taken.

And then, just before it ebbs, the bloodletting reaches out and touches Hungry. Not that anyone is surprised when one of the neighborhood’s most committed short-count artists and stash stealers suddenly has his number come up. Hungry’s time had been borrowed for a good while, and maybe that’s what makes his last go-round seem so tragic and absurd. A young slinger, Smiley by name, had been off Fayette and Monroe for a while now, plying the bottom end, competing with Dewayne and Boo and the other young boys, working vials along the lower McHenry Street strip. But come the heat of July, he finds himself back up top, paired with one of the New York Boys and a particularly weak package of heroin. He stands by the carryout, scouring the morning regulars on a day when good help is hard to find.

And Hungry gets his package.

To sell, of course—not to keep. But the distinction is lost on Hungry, who must be astounded that anyone on Fayette Street is still naive enough to give him a starter kit. No slinking, no ground-stash stealing, no palming a few vials and hoping against hope that the short-count doesn’t get noticed—just a few nods of agreement and he’s got the whole world in his hands.

Smiley heads off while Hungry takes the consignment into Blue’s house. There, with Rita’s help, it begins to go the way of all contraband—at least until Hungry notices that for all of this free dope, he’s not getting off. The package isn’t much.

Disappointed, he reasons that he might as well actually sell some off and take what profit he can. But up on Monroe Street, Smiley’s garbage isn’t moving. Word is already out that what Hungry has been given just ain’t what it claims to be. And when Smiley comes back, with the New Yorker behind him, he isn’t trying to hear any of it. The two come at Hungry hard—not once, not twice, but enough times that Hungry gets the whole you-gonna-die-if-I-ain’t-paid-tommorrow lecture. When he hears any part of it, Hungry winces, because Hungry is always short, always beholden, always waiting for the inevitable. He knows the beating;
he lives with the beating. It’s the established rate of exchange. In Hungry’s mind, it completes the transaction and settles all debts.

So when Smiley throws out his threats and walks away, Hungry doesn’t quite take it in. He’s still standing there the following afternoon, up against the metal grate of the carryout, when the dealer returns to make his final pass with a lock-blade.

Once in and once out. Hungry greets the knife with open arms and a vague expression of surprise. Then he walks a step and a half, his legs heading in the general direction of the Bon Secours E.R., where the day crew keeps his usual gurney ready. Then he drops.

Everyone on the corner sees it, watching as Smiley stalks away and Hungry tries to pick himself up off the curb. He grabs hold of a small tree, trying for purchase, then slips down and lies still. The crowd melts off. The ambulance arrives. The yellow crime scene tape goes up.

Inside the shooting gallery that day, no one says much; when Hungry is the subject, what’s left to say? The most that anyone can manage is a few harsh words for the young hopper with the knife. What was the nigger thinking, anyway? You give a package to Hungry, you might as well toss it in a storm drain. And then to settle up with the man at the point of a blade—that was out of all the understood proportions. Hungry steals your shit, or comes up short you beat him down: fair is fair. But it wasn’t personal. Hungry took everyone’s shit; Hungry was always short. To cut him down on a crowded corner for $100 or $150 in lost product made about as much sense as sucker-punching that A-rabber’s horse for pissing.

Fat Curt was just down the street and missed the murder. Pimp saw it though. So did Scalio. And Blue. And Robin Neverdon, a coke fiend from the other side of Fayette. And although it takes the detectives a good while to shake the tree—a cornerful of eyeball witnesses does not, in this neck of the woods, necessarily equate with a solved case—eventually there comes a knock on the front door of the shooting gallery, the one that says the world is suddenly paying attention to the people inside Blue’s rowhouse.

“Poh-leece. Homicide.”

Fat Curt’s brother, Dennis, cracks the door, gets a look at two white men in suits and backs into the hallway.

“Where’s Blue?” asks a detective.

Dennis mumbles something, the air wheezing through the hole in his neck. The trache is still there more than a year after the last emergency room visit.

“Where’s Blue at?”

The suits press the issue, moving down the hallway, deeper into the catacomb. In the front room, Fat Curt is propped on a wooden chair, one swollen hand wrapped around a bent screwdriver that he’s using to claw at his cast. He’s gnawing at it like an animal caught in a trap.

“Cast got wet,” he tells them.

Wrapped in deadweight, his leg has been hurting for weeks now. Worse, the summer heat has made the constricting plaster unbearable. Curt figures he’ll doctor himself.

“You Blue?”

Curt shrugs. “Don’t know the man.”

The detectives move back into the kitchen and a shorter fiend slips down the stairs, turns into the hallway and makes for the door.

“Hey,” says one suit, “you right there. Are you Blue?”

“Naw,” Blue replies before leaving. “He gone.”

For a veteran detective, the usual process would be to gather the nearest and dearest together and plead on the dead man’s behalf—a standardized speech angled at family and friendship, loyalty and common decency. But after wandering the first floor of Blue’s for a few minutes, it’s clear to the police that none of that counts for much here. They go the other route.

“If we don’t find Blue, everyone’s getting locked up.”

That cuts it. Dennis goes down the hall to the front door and yells for Blue to come home. When George Epps finally makes his way back, he’s greeted by two very impatient police investigators.

“Why’d you say you weren’t Blue?” the red-haired one asks.

Blue flashes a mock-innocent smile. “Man,” he tells them, “you know how that is.”

They know. They put him in the back of a Chevy Cavalier and ride him downtown, where they get confirmation on the story of Hungry and Smiley and the lost package. They grab Robin from across the street and Robin gives up much the same tale. A third witness cinches it and the radio cars roll up on Vine Street a few days later, slowing in front of the rowhouse where Smiley lays his head.

The murder and subsequent arrest is barely noted on the corner, spoken of only at odd points and in the most abstract terms. In the shooting gallery, Hungry is not mourned as a lost soul so much as he is missed for continuity’s sake. At the least, death interferes with the illusion; it always ruins the high. When Bread fell out and died, the rest of them
had to acknowledge their own certain terminus. Dennis, who has the Bug, can imagine himself collapsing on the couch at Annie’s and being hauled off by the ambo. And Pimp, rail-thin with the same virus, can imagine his own people paying to have him laid out at Brown’s, then buried without a headstone down at Mt. Zion. And Bryan, who survived the bullets this winter but now has to get his AZT at the University clinic and deal with the night sweats and nausea—he gets a glimpse of just how short his run might be. Hungry is gone. No one musters much grief for that fact alone; it’s the absence of Hungry that bothers them. Here again is proof that not a motherfucker among them is getting out alive.

The summer slowly claims its casualties. Soon Bryan disappears, on the run again after sticking up Eggy Daddy for some of Gee Money’s vials and cash. A desperate act, true, but Bryan can’t think of what else to do when Gee doesn’t pay him promptly at the end of a shift. Then Pimp goes down, coughing and rasping, with double pneumonia. And then, finally, it’s Fat Curt’s turn.

He soldiers until he can soldier no more, until the hot July day when he falls to the pavement at the crossroads that claimed him years before. He’s had the wet cast off his leg for a couple weeks—long enough to prove that the doctors were right, that the ankle wasn’t going to set right if he didn’t stay off his feet. Without the cast, Curt is soon hobbling around with his foot twisted to one side, his metal cane getting him where he needs to be, his face etched with constant pain.

“Got to get it looked at,” he tells anyone who asks. “Got to get some doctorin’ on it.”

But he never does. Despite weeks of agony, it isn’t the ankle that brings him back to Bon Secours. It’s Fat Curt lying on the corner of Monroe and Fayette, talking out of his head, delirious, his eyes buried beneath a yellow glaze.

“Curt … Curt.”

“He ain’t makin’ sense.”

“Somebody got to call nine-one-one.”

On the last day of July, Curt is rushed into the E. R. at Bon Secours, stabilized, then sent up to the second floor and a semiprivate room. When he wakes up, he’s on an intravenous feed, sick as a dog, his warped frame wrapped in a hospital robe. Before long, the young interns are crowded around his bed, pausing in their routine to take in the enormity of the damage.

“Treat me like a freak,” he says after they leave.

The nurses are warmer to him, but even they test his patience with continual questions about his medical history—as if Bon Secours didn’t already know everything there was to know about him from springtime, when he broke the ankle.

“I ain’t sayin’,” Curt tells one nurse who queries him.

“Why not? This is to help the doctors.”

“’Cause I can’t remember what I told you the last time and I don’t want to get caught lyin’,” Curt explains. “Keep askin’ me the same damn questions an’ I can’t recall my answers.”

Even the nurse laughs.

He’s there for two weeks, and after the first two days or so, he’s clean. For Curt, the snake has never been the problem. He likes shooting dope; it’s his life. But if the dope isn’t there, he’ll get a little bit sick, deal with that, and then come up smiling. For two days, he looks like hell itself and then, slowly, some other being emerges from within, someone never seen at the corner of Monroe and Fayette.

“What’s for lunch today, darlin’.”

The nurses are all darlings. The other patients are good peoples. The sound of summer rain at his hospital window reminds him of better times. Even the hospital food is tolerable.

“Rather have some of that pork from Bittman’s,” he tells visitors. “Pork sandwich, fries, greens, and a Coke.”

The dope goes away, but the dope fiend’s sweet tooth doesn’t. Stink shows up one day to catch Curt up on the corner news; Curt leans on him for a couple sodas from across the street. Rose and Curt Junior come by with drugstore candy and, for an afternoon, Curt’s broken family is gathered together once again at his bedside, eating sweets and watching daytime television. Most of all, Curt dreams about getting uptown to that snowball stand at Laurens and Monroe, getting some coin together, and making summer official.

“Get me some pineapple flavor,” he says. “Ain’t nothin’ better than the pineapple.”

After long years of chemical torpor, the sudden liberation of body and mind is exhilarating to Curt and everyone who comes near him. His memory is clear and firm; long-lost stories pour from him, stories to pass the hospital hours. He’s talking about the drug runs to New York and the adventures in that city, telling tales out of school about Little Melvin and Liddie and Junior Bunk and two dozen other long-gone players from his youth.

“Dead and gone. All my friends is dead and gone,” he says, reflectively. “Outlived most of ’em. Just lost Bread to this foolishness not long ago. He was a good friend.”

Curt is sad, of course; too much has been wasted to get beyond sadness. But now there is something more than sadness to him, something given full flower in the stable confines of a hospital bed. Now, with the corner at bay, all the normal needs and desires of life come rushing up at him. He wants the kid in the next bed over, the one recovering from a gunshot wound, to be comfortable and comforted. He wants the charge nurse to like him a little bit. He wants another soda. He wants something tastier than that nasty green Jell-O for dessert. Within a week, his wants grow into long-term aspirations. He wants to get an apartment. He wants to do something for Rose and for his teenaged son, who have been on their own for so long. He wants someone to take a picture of his legs and put it on a T-shirt, give it away at all the schools and let the children see what the needle does. He wants a little government money on check day—enough to pay the rent and buy groceries. And on several early mornings that other part of him is very much alive and then he wants the big-legged nurse on the night shift, the fine-looking one who’s been kind enough to flirt.

Fat Curt is off the corner. And he is alive.

Physically, of course, he’s falling apart: hepatitis, jaundice, his liver holding on by a thread, the enzyme counts hovering at levels that can be attained only through years of pharmaceutical riot. The lymphedema in all four limbs is now likely past the point of return; if Curt stops firing dope tomorrow, the hands and legs will still stay fat. The ankle is irrevocably disfigured. Fusing it might have some beneficial effect, but nothing can ever make it right. The healed abscesses are permanent scars; the open ones promise only sepsis.

“You keep shooting drugs,” the social worker tells him, “and you’ll be dead within months. Your liver has about given up.”

Curt can only smile at the thought. “My liver got every right to give up. I know it. You ain’t got to tell me that.”

“I’m serious, Curtis. You’ll die.”

“I hear you. I know it.”

Her name is Kathy. She leaves her name and number on Curt’s chart, telling him that she’ll help, that if he wants to do something different, she’ll work with him on some kind of plan. “But,” she adds, “I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve had a lot of experience. I know that if
you don’t want to change yourself, then you’re only wasting my time. And I’m not going to let you waste my time, you understand?”