The Corner (57 page)

As for Bunchie, she doesn’t believe it for a second.

“You think you goin’ next week, huh?” she asks Fran.

“Tuesday,” Fran says. “BRC has intake on Tuesdays.”

“Well, we all could use a break.”

A break. The word meant exactly that—a pause in the action, a temporary respite from the ordinary grind. Bunchie doesn’t need to quit snorting heroin and smoking coke altogether; she just needs a break. The same for everyone: Fiends don’t need to give up the needle forever, they just need some time off for good behavior. Fran had been in treatment years before so she knows from experience what the word means and what it doesn’t mean. She remembers being out at Oakview with the rest of them, talking the talk, telling stories and hearing the stories told. She can recall how many people came into detox with only the merest pretense of changing, when the real agenda was getting a brief vacation, a chance for the body to regain some strength before the next deluge. She had thought that way herself.

This time would be different, though. She’s thirty-six years old; she’s had her fun, and finally, she’s ready. This is bottom. She can feel it.

On Saturday, when Gary comes down Fayette to the Dew Drop to share his morning blast with Fran, he hears the big news and is immediately suspicious—especially when he gets hold of the dollars-and-cents angle to Fran’s sudden renewal. Yeah, he’ll try to help DeAndre out a little bit, he says vaguely. Naw, he doesn’t have ten dollars that Fran can hold right now. Later, when he goes upstairs and sees Fran packing her belongings in a green plastic garbage sack, he comes around.

“You really gonna do it,” Gary says softly.

“Got to,” she tells him. “You should go down there, too.”

“I’m gonna,” he insists. “You’ll see. I’m gonna get past this for real. You gonna see.”

She hears him and shakes her head dismissively. Dope fiends are always going to get past it. Twenty times in a bad day they’re talking that shit to someone, usually to themselves. Miss a vein, you gonna quit. Shoot baking soda, you done. Get yourself stuck up, or fall out from an overdose, or have your money walk away—all are reasons to declare that you’ve had enough, that you’re ready to get your name on a waiting list somewhere. Only it doesn’t happen that way—the corner never gives anyone enough reason. It comes from within, or it doesn’t come at all.

“Gary, you talkin’ out your ass.”

He gets mad, but Fran is feeling too different these days to care. And she isn’t about to let Gary McCullough off with a mere lecture.

“You workin’ now, right?”

“Down the crabhouse. Cardy got me some days.”

She just looks at him. Too late. Gary sees the trap. True, after the Baker Street junkyard debacle, he’d found steady work at Seapride. And true, the crabhouse has for a couple weeks now been paying him six an hour, six shifts a week. But these are hand-to-spike dollars for Gary’s habit, not for Fran’s redemption.

“Lemme hold ten,” she says.

Gary starts shaking his head, backing up, telling her that he doesn’t get paid until whenever, that it’s got to last him until God knows when.

“C’mon, Gary, I’m tryin’ to do something here. I got to look out for Andre while I’m gone.”

Gary has one hand to his forehead, trying to think of words that won’t come fast enough.

“Gary, for your son.”

“I’ll get with Andre and help him out.”

“Gary, c’mon.”

“I will.”

“Gary.”

He looks up at her, angry and defeated. She has his number and he knows it. She’s always had his number.

“Fran,” he says, with a nod to the blast shared. “I just treated you and you askin’ for more. I ain’t got it.”

“Lemme hold five then.”

Gary takes the deal. Five dollars is the price for walking away from the Dew Drop Inn with some small piece of conscience intact. But he leaves feeling scammed, unable to find the words to wish her good luck or bon voyage or break a leg. He’s halfway down the steps before Fran makes him come back.

“Where you goin’ at?”

“What do you mean?” asks Gary.

“I be gone a long while,” she says. “Don’t I get a hug?”

Yes she does; she always does. They embrace at the top of the stairs and Gary can’t keep the smile from his face.

“Why you mess with me so bad?” he asks her.

Fran laughs. Finally, she lets him go, promising that she’ll keep one
eye on the men’s dorm and see if there’s a bed for him. If not, she’ll get him on the waiting list.

“You gonna look in on Andre, right?”

Gary says he will.

“Okay then.”

For a few minutes, at least, she’s alone. Spreading the bills out on the worn bedsheet, she calculates the necessities. This much for food money. That much to get some lotion and towels. This much she has to give Bunchie.

She’s got sixty left. Party time.

And why should anyone be suprised at the notion? If she didn’t have a problem in the first place, she wouldn’t need detox. So the least she can do—the least anyone could expect her to do—is to step off Fayette Street in as fine a fashion as possible. For most of the city’s drug rehab facilities, the pre-intake party is not a possibility; lacking medical staffing, they aren’t willing to take people wet and then detox them. At Tuerk House or Francis Scott Key, you have to dry yourself out before going inside. But BRC has a medical unit and a doctor on call; they take fiends as any self-respecting fiend would want to be taken.

Come that first Tuesday in August, the sixty dollars is a memory and Fran is out on the steps, her bloodied eyes squinting in the morning sun. Her joints ache and her head is on fire. She presses a damp washrag to her eyes as she sits there, showing no more life than the green plastic sack at her side. She waits for the hack, thinking to herself that she’s had her fun, that she feels so bad that even her morning snort can’t set her right. She’s wrecked. It is, in short, a beautiful day to detox.

“Ma.”

“What?”

DeAndre pads down the steps wearing gym shorts. He rubs his eyes and peers out at the morning.

“When you leavin’ out?”

“In a couple. Your brother up?”

“He still ’sleep.”

He sits beside her on the steps, watching the street stir. There’s nothing said—DeAndre isn’t like that—but Fran can tell he’s with her, that after all this time, he’s still willing to believe.

“You got what you need?” he asks, gesturing at the bag.

“Yeah, mostly. You gonna visit?”

“I be by.”

She puts an arm around his shoulder. He lets it stay.

“Well, you take care of DeRodd. You can take him to Karen’s if you need to. You gonna go back to the McDonald’s?”

DeAndre shrugs. “Man, to hell with that. I might make an appointment to go back and beat that faggy manager’s ass.”

Fran grimaces and DeAndre picks up on it. He tells her that he’ll keep trying, that he plans to take a walk down to Mt. Clare and Westside and see if any stores are hiring.

Stevie comes down the stairs and gives her a hug. So does Sherry. Eventually, Fran hears that her youngest is up and she goes back upstairs to cuddle DeRodd a bit.

“You gonna come past and see me, right?”

“Yeah.”

DeRodd doesn’t have a clue, thank God. His mother’s going away for a while for some kind of program, and he’ll be staying with DeAndre or his uncle. Karen is the backup plan.

“You don’t go runnin’ off. You stay around here or up on Saratoga. You hear me?”

DeRodd pouts and nods.

She goes back downstairs where the hack is idling. She takes some last good-byes from Black Donnie, Alfred, and Ronnie Hughes, then she rolls out. On Mount Street, even Drac waves at her—a good-luck gesture to one of his more durable customers. They’re turning down Baltimore Street when Fran sees her father on the stoop across from the supermarket, the paper bag in his hand. She waves but he doesn’t see. At Gilmor, she sees Bunchie on the corner. She doesn’t wave.

“I’m gone,” she says, more to herself than anyone, as if she needs convincing.

Down at BRC, she nods to the receptionist, gives him her name, and slumps into the same chair where she waited for Antoinette on the last goround. She leaves her bag on her lap; biting her nails, she waits quietly.

“You have an appointment?” the man asks.

“I’m checkin’ in. My bed came up.”

The man nods, then pages Antoinette. Fran reaches into the sack for the wet rag, which she uses to daub her eyes again. The receptionist looks at her, then looks away quickly, but Fran catches it. She knows she looks like hell, and not just because of the weekend party either. She’s been on the corners so long that she’s skin and bone. Her weight is down
near ninety-five, her face a gaunt, spare package of lines and hollows. Her hair is pulled back tight, sharpening those lines.

Five minutes pass. Fran goes back into her plastic sack for a pearl-handled penknife. She starts digging at her nails.

“She comin’?” she asks.

“I left a message at her office.”

Five minutes more and Antoinette finally emerges at the top of the flight of steps. Fran pulls herself up.

“Can I help you?” Antoinette asks, coming down.

“Uh, Fran, I mean, Denise Boyd. I check in today.”

Antoinette looks perplexed. “Checking in today?”

“Yeah.”

“Who told you that?”

“You did last week. You said to come in Tuesday. Don’t you remember. I talked to you last week.”

“Um … I don’t know, Fran. I don’t think so. You’re on the top of the list, but we aren’t expecting anyone today.”

“You said …” Fran stammers, looking for words, pacing in the lobby as it starts to sink in. “You said …”

“Fran, there’s been a mistake.”

“You damn right,” Fran wails. She’s waving her hand angrily, puncturing the air with that tiny penknife. “You damn right it’s a mistake. You told me last week.”

Antoinette catches the glint of the knife and backs up toward the receptionist’s desk.

“Fran, I’m saying there must be some misunderstanding.”

“How’m I … I told … I don’t believe this shit,” Fran says bitterly. “I told everyone I was gone.”

“Fran, I’m sorry.”

She’s standing in the middle of the lobby, her sudden anger betrayed by an equally sudden wave of tears. Antoinette takes one last nervous look at the penknife, then crosses into the breach, taking the smaller woman in her arms. Fran lets go, crying into Antoinette’s shoulder.

“What am I going to tell them?” she cries.

“Fran, you’re on the top of the list,” Antoinette assures her. “We’ll definitely have a bed next week.”

“I can’t make it.”

“Yes, you can.”

“I can’t. I can’t go back.”

“You got to. Fran, you’ll be in next week. Definitely.”

Slowly and by degrees she gets hold of herself as the drug counselor reassures her once again. Arrangements are made, numbers exchanged. The small details are made certain.

“So I’ll see you Tuesday,” Antoinette tells her.

“Yes you will.”

Fran picks up her green sack and looks at the double glass doors. She doesn’t have the heart to leave yet, but when she turns back, Antoinette is up the stairs, waving a last good-bye. Fran retreats to the lobby chair, dropping the bag at her feet. She blows her nose and wipes her eyes.

“If you’d’ve come with a bigger knife,” says the man at the front desk, “you might’ve got in.”

Fran looks at him strangely and he smiles back, gesturing at the tiny blade still gripped in her right hand. Fran looks down and her mouth drops open. She looks at the empty place where Antoinette used to be. The man laughs.

Fran laughs too, softly at first, then louder.

“I probably scared that girl to death,” she says finally, shaking her head.

“Yeah, you did,” agrees the man.

“Well,” says Fran, “she’s all right with it now.”

Twenty minutes later, the corner of Mount and Fayette is fat and full when she goes up the steps of the Dew Drop. Bunchie isn’t around, thank God, but DeAndre is by the pay phone in front of the carryout and glimpses her. He says nothing, but she can see it in his face.

She passes Stevie on the stairs.

“Hey, Fran.”

“Anyone usin’ your room?”

“Naw,” says Stevie. If he’s wondering what happened, he has sense enough to keep it to himself.

Fran slides stone-faced into the apartment, where she drops her bag and knocks on her brother’s bedroom door just in case. Inside, the room is wrapped in an orange glow from Stevie’s broken television. As she drops down on the bed, she can hear Little Stevie in the hall, shouting down the steps to DeRodd, telling him to come upstairs and help him with a bike tire. The television set in the front room is showing
I Love Lucy
with the volume turned up. Outside, there is the the usual din, broken only by the high-pitched chant of a day-shift tout, crying out for Red-and-White.

She cries like she hasn’t cried in years.

“Is’m,” says DeAndre, exhaling.

Tae laughs. An inside joke.

“What?” asks R.C.

“Is’m,” says DeAndre, as Tae passes Dinky the blunt.

“Boy, what in hell you talkin’ ’bout?” asks R.C.

Dinky takes a quick hit and passes the hollowed-out cigar back to DeAndre, who breathes deeply, holds the smoke down, then lets it go in one long, thin cloud.

“Is I’m high,” says DeAndre, laughing.

“That’s what we callin’ good weed now,” Tae explains. “You know, by Andre being fucked up last night and I say to him, you know, I say you high on that shit yet?”

“Huh,” says R.C., barely tracking.

“And,” Tae continues, “he just looks at me all fucked up and says, ‘Is’m.’”

Dinky and DeAndre both laugh.

“Is’m,” says R.C., trying it out.

“Yeah boy,” says DeAndre, his eyes bloodshot. “Got to get up to Edmondson Avenue and get me some more is’m.”

For the C.M.B. crew, this constituted summer—a series of listless repetitions performed in an area of eight or ten square city blocks. R.C. went to New Jersey to see his mother’s people one weekend; Tae, Manny Man, and a few of the others latched on to a church trip to King’s Dominion amusement park; on another occasion, Ella took half the neighborhood to the county for inner-tubing and a picnic at Gunpowder Falls. But beyond those occasional sojourns, everything else was static. Life was held at bay; hope had slipped into fantasy. Elsewhere school ended and the summer months were ripe with promise. Elsewhere it was a choice between summer camps or summer jobs, college prep courses
or driving lessons, weekends at the shore or seven European countries in fourteen days. But on McHenry Street that summer, the children of the corner were fitted to their new world. They did nothing, produced nothing, achieved nothing—traveling no further in body or spirit than a moment ‘s pleasure required.

Another blunt is lit and the boys laugh again, then settle in to watch the evening traffic on the lower strip. Tonight they plan to ease back, get high and do nothing with Gilmor and McHenry, the fledgling corner brought to life by Tae and Dinky. Dewayne is down on South Vincent Street selling coke. Boo is at Ramsay and Stricker with his brothers. But the rest of C.M.B. is in a slow chill, waiting for the adventure of a summer’s night to find them.

“I wish them stickup boys would come back,” says Dinky, changing the subject. “By us being deep, we could fuck them up good if they come past tonight.”

Late last night, a two-man stickup crew made an appearance on Ramsay Street, jacking up R.C., Manny Man, and Dinky as they were coming across the playground. Flashing a small automatic, the highwaymen got a buck or two each from R.C. and Dinky. Luckless as ever, Manny went into his pants slowly, trying to remember which pocket held the wadded $20 bill and which held the throwaway single. He’d been carrying money that way since he was robbed last year, when he tried to back down a stickup boy and got shot in the leg for the effort. Manny faked left, went right, offering up one bill while palming the other and tossing it behind him on the ground.

“There went our weed money,” said R.C., watching as the gunmen rolled out.

“Not all of it,” said Manny, hopeful, as he turned around to pick up the wadded bill. He unrolled the green ball slowly, cursing suddenly when the denomination revealed itself.

“I gave them motherfuckers my twenty,” he wailed.

The occasional misadventure aside, McHenry Street had become the summer playground in this last summer of the Crenshaw Mafia Brothers. By the same time next year, C.M.B. will be scattered to the winds, all of them sixteen or seventeen or eighteen, working separate corners with separate packages, trying to get over on everyone including each other. Another year and the childhood loyalties will be pressed and shattered. For now, though, they are still playing at the corner: a package here, a bundle there, and everyone has money for cheesesteaks and weed, Tims
and Nikes, movie passes and dance tapes. And even on nights like this one, when no one is making money, McHenry Street is still the place to hang.

For one thing, the lower strip isn’t hot like Fayette Street. Down here, it’s the Southern District and the police don’t yet know their faces. Down here, nothing compares to Bob Brown, or Pitbull, or Shields. Not yet anyway. And C.M B. is no longer beefing with any of the crews down bottom, so DeAndre and Tae can freely chase South Baltimore girls, just as R.C. or Dinky can venture down to the outside court at Ramsay and Stricker and get a game or two. The quality of play isn’t much—the white boys really can’t jump—but it’s a better outdoor court than the makeshift hoop on Lemmon Street and good enough to pass an evening.

This summer, the boys down on McHenry Street are, well, boys. They think and act as children; often failing at the game, but always learning, and never quite giving the corner their full and undivided attention. They’re all smoking weed, but few among them are yet willing to play at anything stronger. Only Boo, who is looking worn and rough, stands accused of hitting the pipe, and he denies the allegation. As for slinging, it’s still more adventure than economic imperative. They spend most days waking up late, taking a stroll down the bottom, and if nothing else is happening, opening up shop for a couple of hours—maybe just working the afternoon shift change, when the Southern officers are off the street—putting in just enough time and energy to turn pocket money.

As the summer burns on, Dorian gets caught first. He comes back home, then gets locked up again. Manny Man takes a charge coming out the back of a vacant house where one crew is keeping the stash. R.C. catches an assault charge behind a corner fight. Not that it isn’t possible to have a good run on McHenry Street, a run of the kind that DeAndre made on Fairmount this past winter. McHenry is virgin territory. A slinger could feed the white trade all day long, turning one eight ball, then another, then parlaying the money into an ounce. From there, he’s off and running. Stick at it long enough and he might finish a week with two thousand dollars in his pocket—real money for real work. But for the C.M.B. crew, the best they can manage is a couple hundred on the odd shift. And some nights, of course, no one makes real money. By short count or by stolen stash, by unpaid debt or by stickup, the margin evaporates.

Twenty dollars here, forty there—the stakes are still fairly small this summer and so the guns don’t come out very often. For the most part,
the C.M.B. boys are still unwilling to risk a charge that might kick them upstairs to an adult court, nothing more serious than, say, possession with intent. Most nights, they leave their irons at home, rushing back up the hill and going under mattresses and dressers only on those rare occasions when a beef gets out of hand.

For R.C., school is now officially dead, and at fifteen—a year younger than DeAndre—there isn’t much point to canvassing the fast-food joints for summer work. They only hire sixteen and above. He could have gone down to the Civic Center with Kevin, Arnold, and Manny Man a few weeks back, when the city had a one-day signup for federally funded summer jobs. He talked like he was going, but in the end, he slept in that morning and then blew off the rest of the day watching cartoons. He had some money in his pocket every month from his father’s death-benefit check, and the part-time slinging brought a little more. He wasn’t about anything more than that, or, for that matter, about anything at all save basketball. Or maybe, a few years down the road, he’d be eighteen and old enough so that his brothers could do what they did for Mike Ellerbee. R.C. would bide his time, play at this corner game and then get that Z-card and full membership in the seafarers union. It was a better plan by far than standing around all day in line after line at the Civic Center, filling out forms and answering questions to get a hard hat and push a broom. Sure, Kevin got a job at the B & O Railroad Museum. Arnold, too. But Manny Man went through the whole hurry-up-and-wait and didn’t get a damn thing. R.C. had to laugh at that.

As for DeAndre, he had largely abandoned the idea of a summer job after that last sortie to the McDonald’s outlet in East Baltimore. Come check days, he bums a few dollars from his mother, then, when that runs out, he leeches a few more from Dinky or Tae or Boo—whoever is flush at the moment. It’s enough for sandwiches and weed and the occasional forty of malt liquor, enough to keep the party going, but not nearly enough to get him past living hand-to-mouth. When he does scrape a bit of a roll together, he leans heavily on others to sell his package. Sometimes this works, sometimes not.

Through the Fourth of July, as the rest of the crew sold coke and dope openly at Gilmor and McHenry, DeAndre kept himself at the water’s edge, hanging with his boys, pooling his money on a package or two, but quietly refusing to man a corner and get business done. He reasoned that if he stood to the side, with someone else holding the vials, he couldn’t take another charge. The theory, though flawed, showed more
caution than usual. Working at a distance, though, he soon enough found himself coping with thievery and incompetence on every level. Dorian, Brooks, R.C., Manny Man—all of them owed him money on spillage and miscounts. At street level it was damn near impossible for a slinger to subcontract and still make money. Once the vials left his hand, DeAndre had very little control, and by midsummer, he had heard every possible excuse to explain short money.

“Nigger got my stash.”

“Police rolled past. I threw it down and it wadn’t there after.”

“You ain’t give me twenty. You gave me fifteen.”

“My moms found ’em in my room. She high as shit.”

These are his friends; he had been raised up with them. But with the exception of Dinky, his stalwart cousin, and Tae, the C.M.B. crew is as capable of cheating and thieving and messing up a count as any collection of drug-addled touts. By and large, what was owed to him by the likes of Dorian and R.C. went uncollected.

In late July, he did a little better, pooling his money with his cousin Dinky and going in on a package with Kwame and Shamrock, who were willing to front them on consignment. The arrangement worked well enough that he went into August with a couple hundred in his pocket, namely because his cousin proved to be the most reliable member of the crew.

Light-skinned, freckled, and unnervingly polite, Dinky was the son of Roberta McCullough’s cousin, making him some kind of kin to DeAndre. On that tenuous connection, a strong familial bond had developed over the years. Dinky had heart. He loved to battle—more than the rest of the crew, more even than DeAndre. He would not cheat, he would not run. And since every other C.M.B. friendship had managed to disappoint DeAndre at one time or another, Dinky had, by default, become his closest companion.

As the summer wore on, it fell to Dinky to do much of the street work on DeAndre’s occasional packages. Since taking his last charge on Fairmount Avenue, DeAndre had largely kept to his low-profile plan, fearing that one more arrest would mean juvenile detention for the rest of the summer. Dinky understood this, just as he understood that DeAndre would want to stay home if Tyreeka turned out to be pregnant. DeAndre was adamant that he wouldn’t be locked up if it really was true; he had no business being locked up if his child was about to be born.

Yet, incredibly, DeAndre entered July with no confirmation of Tyreeka’s condition—nothing stronger, in fact, than his own vague suspicions. Angry at him for chasing other girls, Tyreeka had for two months steered clear of DeAndre, and when they did run into each other, she made it plain that she wasn’t talking to him. Much as he tried, DeAndre couldn’t really blame her. He’d made a show of chasing everything on the street and ensuring that his sixteenth summer was every bit the party he promised himself. He was still pursuing Treecee’s cousin, as well as another girl he’d met at a house party over near Payson Street. Earlier in the summer, he had tried to get with Tyreeka on the off nights, though by then she’d heard so much of his travels she wasn’t as willing to do the dirty as before. Instead, Tyreeka had chosen to spend most of her time with Carver classmates or with girlfriends like Treecee and Dena, both of whom were messing with R.C. this summer. DeAndre had heard that she had once again tried to holler at some of the other C.M.B. boys, but even at a distance, he had been able to shoot that down. No one would mess with Tyreeka until DeAndre gave up on her entirely. Reassured in this, he told himself he would branch out now, then patch things up in the cold months. He’d hibernate with Tyreeka; right now he wanted to run wild.

Still, he’d heard from lots of people that Tyreeka looked like she’d gained weight, that she might be carrying a baby. Once, in late June, he caught up with her in the Lemmon Street alley and tried to talk it over, but Tyreeka hotly denied being pregnant. Wearing a loose T-shirt and shorts, she looked a little heavier to DeAndre, but not so much as he had been told.

“I just need to get on a diet,” she told him.

And DeAndre, busy with Shanelle and a couple other young things, simply let the matter slide and returned to his McHenry Street meanderings. Besides, Tyreeka’s aunt had moved off Stricker Street, taking the family north of the expressway to a two-story rowhouse on Riggs Avenue. So it’s out-of-sight, out-of-mind as far as old girlfriends are concerned. He has no reason to think again on Tyreeka until late July, when Treecee sidles up to him on Fulton Avenue with a bit of news.

“Reeka got your baby.”

“How you know?” DeAndre asks her.

“She told me,” Treecee says. “She thinking about going down to get an abortion. You need to get with her and talk.”

DeAndre catches a hack up to Riggs Avenue, but learns from Tyreeka’s
cousin that she’s down bottom with Dena. And when DeAndre finally locates the two girls on Pratt Street, Tyreeka seems decidedly uninterested in discussing the issue.

“Girl, we got to talk.”

“About what?”

“Treecee sayin’ you pregnant.”

Tyreeka frowns and Dena drifts away. Tyreeka tells him that Treecee shouldn’t have said a damn thing, that she only told the girl because Treecee thinks she might be pregnant by R. C. and the two of them were talking about going to University Hospital together.