The Corner (76 page)

Except that a week or so later, she’d asked her sister where Mike was at. Gone, Bunchie told her.

“Say what?”

“He back on the boat.”

It was true. Mike had come home, stumbled for a day or two, then paused to assess the situation for what it was: “Being back here,” he told people, “it’s like I’m dying.”

He called his shipping agent and got himself on the next container vessel leaving the country. Fran never had a chance to give a good-bye holler.

Why Little Mike? Why not Marvin? Why not her, for that matter? How is it that some people start to stumble and then catch themselves? How does anyone find it possible to tear himself to shreds time and time again, and then, against any sensible expectation, find strength enough to piece himself back together? Logically, Fran knows what is required. She knows she has to make Marvin leave, then forgive herself, then call Antoinette and get back on the waiting list for twenty-eight-day detox. She knows she needs to go to the meetings and get a sponsor and eventually push herself beyond the hero’s welcome and the victory lap. She needs to get a job, hold on to some money, and somehow get her ass out to the county, where people manage to live without a drug corner every two blocks.

Two months ago, when she first emerged from the cocoon of detox, salvation had seemed so certain. She had crawled out of 1625 Fayette, using strength that she could barely recognize as her own. She had gotten sick and gotten well and kicked heroin in the ass, returning to the street after four weeks with a contempt for the corner that bordered on arrogance. Now, it’s all as much a mystery as ever. Now, she can only live moment by moment.

Maybe tomorrow she’ll call down to Antoinette. Maybe after Christmas one of the charity beds will be available. But for now, what she needs to do is stay indoors for a day or two, and then maybe find a way to scrape together enough cash to make it to check-day next.

Instead, she goes to the corner twice that week. On Friday night, she’s up at Franklintown and Baltimore again, looking to start a weekend binge, when she runs across a familiar face.

“Hey, you,” says Shorty Boyd. Marvin’s senior partner, Fran knew, was having himself a nice little run on this corner.

“You seen Marvin?” Fran asks.

“He around. You need him?”

Fran shakes her head.

“What’s up?” Shorty asks.

Not three weeks ago, Fran had been standing at her kitchen window when she saw Shorty get the jump on some young boy and put a gun in his face. Fran watched him strip the boy clean, then walk back up to Baltimore Street, Casual as could be. By the probabilities, Shorty Boyd should be ten years in the grave, yet here he was on Franklintown Road, an independent offering his wares.

“What you got for me?” Fran asks him.

Shorty frowns, then cocks his head. “Thought you was doin’ good,” he says.

“I was,” Fran says.

“Then you don’t need none of this.”

On this night, she goes home taking the words, not the heroin, knowing that she’s already a little bit ill, that lately she’s been celebrating a little too regularly. She lies in bed and thinks about things—about DeAndre and herself and her family, about Marvin and this house and Tyreeka with the baby on the way. She wonders about God or fate or luck, about a player like Shorty Boyd standing out on a corner, selling heroin, then refusing to sell that heroin to her. Shorty Boyd, of all people, living at the broken edges of life all these years—tonight of all nights, he materializes on her corner and gives a good word. As if he cared. As if she mattered.

Lying in bed, Fran swears to herself that she’ll stay inside the whole weekend. She’ll keep hid and get herself well. She’ll do it by force of will, without any help from anyone else. And when she’s done feeling sick, she might clean up the house and borrow some money from Scoogie for the Thanksgiving groceries. She’ll cook for the holiday, have the whole bunch of them over. Maybe call Tyreeka and tell her to come down and spend the long weekend with her and DeAndre. And if Marvin doesn’t get his shit together by the new year, she’ll deal with that, too.

But now, if she can, she will sleep.

DeAnte Tyree McCullough enters this world at 4:15
P
.
M
. on Thanks-giving Day, crying like he knows the whole story.

By then, Tyreeka is beyond spent, her eyes glazed and fixed on the far wall of the Sinai Hospital birthing room. She is fourteen years old, equipped with a minimum of prenatal instruction and no painkillers, and she has just produced a seven-pound, twelve-ounce baby. Even now, with the boychild crying in a midwife’s arms, Tyreeka seems captive to the terror.

DeAndre is beside her at the head of the bed, holding her hand, unable or unwilling to let go. It’s all he has been able to do for the last two hours, every other word and action having departed his mind from the moment he arrived at this life-bringing.

“Hold your son,” Fran orders.

DeAndre looks at his mother, bleary-eyed.

“Hold him,” Fran insists.

He reaches out, both arms stiff and perpendicular to his chest. The midwife gently slips the bundle to him in a cautious, slow-motion handoff, conceding the package only after she’s sure of DeAndre’s intentions.

“He look real strong, Dre,” Fran tells him. “And all that hair, too.”

DeAndre stares down and the child squints back. The new father says and reveals nothing—DeAndre McCullough, for once stripped of bluster, is brought to a pensive silence. The baby gives a little cry.

DeAndre looks up expectantly and the midwife retrieves the infant from his arms. The bundle is presented to Tyreeka, but she’s beyond reaction. After a moment or two, the newborn is taken to the warmer. DeAndre squeezes Tyreeka’s hand one last time, then leaves the birthing room with his mother.

“Damn,” he says in the hallway, offering his first words in two hours. “After seeing that, I have
much
respect for women.”

By ordinary measure, the birth had come easily enough. Tyreeka had endured ten hours of labor, but only the last two of those took place at Sinai Hospital, with the midwife and Fran Boyd talking the teenager through the struggle. The medical particulars, however, don’t begin to reflect the fear and confusion of the event.

For one thing, Tyreeka somehow got her due date wrong, so that the baby, expected some time around Christmas, instead reached full-term on the prior holiday. Early that morning, she had called the birthing center to report intermittent pain. But when questioned by the staffer on duty, Tyreeka had mentioned the Christmas due date. Take a warm bath, she was told. See if the contractions stop.

Which is pretty much all the girl did while enduring the early and
intermediate stages of childbirth. Later, when the urgency of the situation became clear to her, she tried to call friends who had offered to drive her to Sinai Hospital when the big day came. But the plan was for a December birth and on this holiday afternoon, Tyreeka had been unable to reach anyone. Finally, she had called a city ambulance, and then, begging the paramedics through the pain of her contractions, she convinced them to drive not to Liberty Medical, the closest hospital, but to Sinai, where she had been scheduled. By the time she arrived, she looked like a deer transfixed by headlights, a little girl in absolute fear of what her body was doing to her.

When word of the impending event reached DeAndre, he was still high after a day with Preston, Jamie, and the rest of the older Fayette Street crew. Sharing a hack with his mother, DeAndre got to the birthing-room doors just as Tyreeka let out a shriek.

“Um,” said DeAndre, eyes bloody.

“Get in there,” ordered his mother.

He cracked the door, poking his head inside just long enough to see Tyreeka struggling to change position, the midwife and her helpers trying to give directions.

“I’ll be out here,” he declared.

“No you won’t,” his mother told him.

“Ma, there’s too many people in there already.”

Fran didn’t bother to argue. She grabbed her son by the jacket sleeve and tossed him into the room. Once within his girlfriend’s field of vision, he had no choice; he walked meekly to Tyreeka’s side. She saw him and said nothing, but took his hand in a desperate grip.

“Father,” said the midwife, “you can encourage her. She needs to push. She needs to push hard when the contractions come.”

But DeAndre, paralyzed by weed and awe both, kept his hand in Tyreeka’s grip and was silent.

In the final half hour, Fran seized the moment, going to the other side of Tyreeka and talking her through, telling her over and over again to push with all her might.

Horrified and speechless, Tyreeka could only cry.

“The harder you push, the sooner you can rest … Reeka, you got to listen to them. You got to start pushing. Reeka, listen to me now …”

Even the midwife was having a hard time keeping Tyreeka focused, but Fran stayed in her face, demanding action from a lonely and frightened schoolgirl, helping the midwife and assistants as they moved her
between bed and bathroom, looking for new positions to ease the pain. As DeAndre stood, mute and frozen, Fran urged Tyreeka on until the last shout of agony mingled with a wet cry.

Now, the new mother is lost to the world, and DeAndre, dazed in an altogether different sense, goes back to Scoogie’s house on Saratoga Street with his mother, arriving a little before seven. There the Boyd clan has gathered for the holiday. Fran had been cooking all morning before the call came from Tyreeka, and with enough groceries and a decent kitchen, she has a gift for all the family recipes. Sherry, Bunchie, and Scoogie had taken up the slack when Fran left for the hospital, so that soon after she returns from the birth of her grandson, a fourteen-pound bird and a slew of side dishes hit the table.

For every member of the Boyd family, it’s a righteous occasion. It’s also little short of astonishing—an absurd, Norman Rockwell moment for a battered tribe, a clan whose number has, in the past few hours, grown by one.

Scoogie takes the carving knife and does the honors.

“DeAndre thankful for his son,” he says, dishing slices of bird onto a serving plate and looking to DeRodd and Little Stevie. “What else we got to be thankful for?”

DeRodd says nothing. Little Stevie shrugs.

“Ain’t none of us courtside,” DeAndre deadpans.

Big Stevie laughs. He’s in rare form tonight, having come in from his post on the Mount Street corners. He’s cleaned and shaved, adorned in a dapper sports coat. Bunchie is looking good, too; she’s rail thin, as always, but dressed in a pleated skirt and sweater for the occasion. Sherry and Kenny are present, and Alfred as well—the whole Dew Drop contingent transplanted to Scoogie’s dining room, making their way around an oak table that once belonged to their grandmother, taking turns with the serving spoons and carving knives. Bunchie’s daughter, Nicky, brings DeQuan, her four-month-old, and Corey, the child’s father and DeAndre’s slinging partner from last winter when he opened up Fairmount Avenue. At belt level or below, the children—DeRodd and Little Stevie, even Ray Ray, who has started to toddle about—are a sawed-off herd of scavengers, edging the table, grabbing at seconds, and then racing into the living room.

Pints and half-pints of alcohol are in evidence, though by Boyd family standards, the chemistry is tame. There’s not much coke or dope to speak of before the early morning hours, when Kenny, Alfred, Stevie, and
Bunchie will take their walk back up the hill and down Fayette. Instead, there is only the after-dinner lethargy that follows any preposterously large meal.

“Fran?” moans Stevie, stretched across the sofa.

“What?”

“You can burn.”

Fran laughs.

“No joke, Ma,” says DeAndre. “You got skills in the kitchen.”

“It was good, Fran. Real good,” adds Bunchie.

“Reeka missed out on a good meal,” DeAndre muses. “She gonna be mad as I don’t know what.”

Fran snorts.

“Andre a father,” laughs Bunchie, looking at Fran. “My gawd.”

“And DeRodd an uncle,” adds Scoogie.

The idea of it brings the older generation to laughter.

“Uncle Dee-Rodd,” says Fran, trying it out. “It don’t even begin to sound right.”

DeRodd lifts his head off the other sofa, perking up at the mention. “Ma?”

“What?”

“He my cousin, right?”

“He your nephew. You an uncle.”

“I can be that?” asks DeRodd, suddenly ennobled. “I’m an uncle like Uncle Stevie then.”

DeAndre gets up off the sofa, stretches, looks around the living room at the sprawl of his mother’s family, all of them heavy-lidded and half-asleep, dreaming of the second wind required to tackle sweet potato pie.

“I got a son,” he says, more to hear himself say the words than to boast. “I’m a man now. I got a man’s responsibilities.”

Fran snorts again. “Please. You didn’t look like all that much of a man in that hospital room.”

DeAndre laughs, unable to sustain the pretense. “Ma, I was so blunted. I couldn’t say a damn thing. I couldn’t do nuthin’ but just stand there.”

“You did all right. You were in there,” she says charitably. “Reeka had to work, though. She a brave little girl.”

“Most definitely,” DeAndre agrees.

These moments for the family album continue through dessert and
then the cleanup. Finding his mother alone for a minute in the kitchen, DeAndre tries to say what he feels.

“Ma, this was good.”

“Huh?”

“This here. We was a family tonight. Everyone, even Uncle Stevie looked good … like he used to, you know?”

Fran nods.

“We should do this again for Christmas.”

“It was good,” Fran agrees.

“Christmas, I can bring Reeka and my son.”

He leaves that night feeling as good about things as he can remember feeling. He goes up the hill to Vine Street to look for his father, and, not finding Gary there, he shares the good news with his grandparents instead. Then he rolls around the corners—Monroe to Mount to McHenry—to strut his new status in front of anyone willing to listen. No mere cigar for this first-time father, either: He shares one blunt with Preston, another with Dinky and Tae.