The Corner (86 page)

By his accounting, the entire crew is comprised of fuckups, save for himself and Dinky. His cousin, at least, has his back; DeAndre figures it should be enough.

No, to get paid from a corner, you have to go down to the corner. There is no other way. All that one-for-all, all-for-one talk among the standing members of the Crenshaw Mafia Brothers is proving to be just talk after all. They are growing up and growing apart; the corner itself is seeing to that. When they were children, they played the neighborhood games—snatchpops, for one—grabbing ice cream or sodas out of each other’s hands, then yelling no snatch-backs and laughing. Now, they’re palming each other’s vials and running off with ground stashes. A year
or two more and the petty betrayals will accumulate. Soon, they’ll be hunting each other, beating each other, maybe even shooting each other. The corner rules are inexorable.

For now, with the Southern District shift-change only a half hour away, he goes directly down to his corner where Dinky is waiting on him.

“Turner rolled out just before,” Dinky tells him.

The bundles go fast, and DeAndre stands on post, shameless. He’s a player. A hustler. At this point, he could care less what his mother thinks. She’s the one who brought Marvin into the house. She’s the one getting high. She’s the one who’s not doing shit with her life. Last month she went through the check-day money in not much more than a week. This month, the same damn thing. And not only the check money, DeAndre knows, but a hundred that she managed to borrow from friends and relatives who still believed in her, who thought the loan was for Christmas presents for her sons. Naw, DeAndre tells himself, I’m not trying to hear shit from her about any damn thing.

He slings through the shift-change, and when he goes home to Boyd Street after midnight, Fran is upstairs, trying to sleep. In the morning she glares at him but says nothing, and DeAndre feels stronger for it.

No one is pretending anymore. No one is making threats. His mother is back in the mix and he’s free to do what he wants. A couple of days later, DeAndre catches up to his mother in her usual spot on Fayette Street, perched on the front steps of the Dew Drop with the regulars. Bunchie and Stevie, Drac and Little Roy, Ronnie Hughes and Michael and Sherry.

“Hey,” he says.

“Lemme hold ten,” she says.

“I’m broke.”

Fran gives him a cold look, but doesn’t press for the money, instead telling him that it’s fine, that she doesn’t want anything from him anyway.

“You think you big-time,” she tells her son. “You ain’t shit, little boy.”

“Yeah, all right,” he mutters, stalking off.

Fran watches her son go, her heart closed to him, if only for this moment. She’s back where she started—back to her games, her angles, her getting over on people, one blast at a time. And, she’s willing to admit to herself, she’s certainly better at the corner life than at any other kind of existence. Life without dope and coke was all complexity and
aggravation. But today she made some money. She palmed some vials. She did what needed to be done.

Tomorrow, she tells herself. Tomorrow she’ll sleep in, get sick, get well. But the fall is accelerating: She’s now getting high three or four nights a week, telling herself that it’s no big thing, that she can carry this or leave it be. Incredibly, though, she’s able to slow herself down briefly before succumbing to the long descent back down to the bottom. Just before Christmas, she fashions a plan for the holidays.

Dragging herself off Fayette Street, Fran talks to Scoogie, convincing her brother to go down to the market with her for groceries. With all else around her a disaster, the idea of Christmas dinner becomes Fran’s touchstone—an emotional link with last month’s Thanksgiving feast, when the Boyds stepped off the corner and dressed themselves up for a rare moment of familial harmony. She’ll do it again, she tells herself. She’ll recreate that moment down to the last piece of sweet potato pie.

Two days after cursing her son on the Dew Drop steps, Fran is down at the market on Pratt Street, sizing up birds with her brother. Scoogie is with her in large part to see that his money goes toward actual groceries, though it’s true that he’s as captivated as Fran is by the memory of his family’s Thanksgiving epiphany.

“Even Stevie looked good,” he tells her.

“Yes indeed. Cleaned up and all.”

All day on the twenty-fifth, she burns her heart out in Scoogie’s kitchen. If redemption was a matter of bread dressing and brown gravy, Fran Boyd would be a woman saved.

Laying down dish after dish on the dining room table, she waits for the others to drift in from Fayette Street. As for Marvin Parker, she dealt with him the best she could, telling him she wouldn’t be around Boyd Street much during the holidays and that he needed to get his shit in order by the new year. Marvin threw her the same old bone about having called the detox clinic, telling her his name was definitely on the waiting list. In her mind, Fran is through with Marvin, but she can’t put him out just yet—not during the holidays, not while the weather’s bad and he’s got nowhere to go.

The Christmas feast is every bit as awesome as Thanksgiving, except that this time Bunchie, Sherry, Alfred, and Kenny rush in at the last moment in worn denims and sweats. Stevie wanders in late, pupils wide, eyes heavy-lidded, his gaunt frame leaning at improbable angles, swaying precipitously in the gale force of a good package.

And DeAndre. The boy staggers in when the food is half gone, brushing past aunts and uncles with scarcely a word. He grabs a plate, fills it, and lumbers into the living room.

Tyreeka is waiting on the sofa, with their son sleeping soundly in his carrier at her feet. She has been sitting there for three hours, staring morosely at music videos, pretending to be waiting for anything in this world other than DeAndre McCullough.

She barely looks up when he steps in front of the television and hits the buttons on the top of the cable box, changing up to an action movie.

“I was watching that,” says Tyreeka softly.

“Not no more,” says DeAndre.

Tyreeka fights back tears, still refusing to look anywhere but at the television. DeAndre gives the top of DeAnte’s head a quick rub, puts his plate on the coffee table and settles into the sofa. Fran can see he’s high, and complains to Scoogie that it’s just like DeAndre to mess up Christmas dinner with a forty-ounce. But moments later, with a half-full plate in front of him and the family bustling around the dining room table and television, DeAndre leans back on the couch and slips into a gaping, openmouthed nod.

Fran looks at him, sees that the denims are soiled, that the army jacket has stains on one shoulder, that the dreds are matted flat. Is this DeAndre, who takes such pride in his clothes, his appearance, his look? And his skin—DeAndre actually looks dusty, his face and neck showing that dull, sheenless pallor that can only come from a hard drug sucking at life itself.

“How Andre look to you?” she asks Scoogie in a whisper.

“Messed up,” says her brother.

“I mean, if I didn’t know better, I’d say he was using dope.”

She lets her own words hang, contemplating them from a distance, as if she’s on the outside of the problem looking in. DeAndre swore he’d never have shit to do with dope or coke. He saw what it did to his father, to her, to everyone else in her family. But that’s him nodding on the sofa, drooling and breathing deep, his food going cold in front of him.

“He just drunk is all,” says Bunchie.

A few minutes more and the boy stirs himself and picks up his fork. He finishes the plate, then shoves DeRodd and Little Stevie off the end of the sofa so he can lie down. When Tyreeka hears him snore, she gets up to change the channel.

Ten minutes later, Bunchie’s daughter, Nicky, arrives with her
boyfriend, Corey, and their baby, DeQuan, and with their arrival, DeAndre begins to show signs of life. He greets Corey and his cousin, then notices DeAnte awake and staring up at him mournfully. He squats beside the baby carrier to play with his son.

“Hey, boy.”

DeAnte gurgles.

“Hey, boy. Who you lookin’ at?”

He still says nothing to Tyreeka, who keeps to the television, watching to see how the Grinch stole Christmas, avoiding all eye contact with DeAndre. Corey finishes his plate, nudges DeAndre, and the two of them gather up their coats.

“Where you going at?” asks Fran.

“Out clubbin’,” says DeAndre.

Fran looks over at Tyreeka. The girl is melting into a corner of the sofa, trying hard not to look up from the cartoon.

“Dinner’s great, Ma,” says DeAndre, turning to leave.

“You not gonna stay around with your son?” asks Fran.

DeAndre bristles. “I see him when I get back.”

He goes. When Fran turns back from the door, she sees Tyreeka, her face half-hidden beneath her open hand, crying.

“Reeka. You and the baby going to stay with me tonight, ain’t you?”

The girl leans over and picks up her child. She manages to nod.

“You’ll see him tonight,” Fran tells her, trying to soften the hurt, but Tyreeka says nothing. Fran walks back into the dining room, where Bunchie, Sherry, and Scoogie have pushed their chairs back from the table and are reliving a shared bit of sibling nostalgia. Pulling a chair close to Bunchie, Fran joins them, content for now just to listen to their meanderings. She wants this moment, and she’s not about to let her son rob her of it. Even Stevie comes alive, rousting himself from his own nod, joining them somewhere along memory lane.

Despite the shaky start, the evening holds Fran’s small desire. Not until well after midnight, with dishes clean and drying, do Fran, Tyreeka, and DeRodd struggle down Saratoga Street with DeAnte and the several plastic bags stuffed with his paraphernalia.

“DeAndre be in a better mood when he gets home,” Fran assures Tyreeka. “You know how he be acting around Corey.”

It doesn’t play out that way, though. Tyreeka hangs around Boyd Street for a couple of days, but DeAndre barely acknowledges her presence in the brief stretches of time when he shows himself. Otherwise, he’s down
on McHenry Street with his boys, or clubbing and partying at night. Fran tries to intercede, but DeAndre is unreachable.

When Tyreeka is finally ready to go home to Riggs Avenue, Fran helps her pack her things and arranges for a hack. The young mother leaves with the baby just after dinner; the father is still running the streets somewhere.

“I’ll tell him you waited as long as you could,” says Fran.

“Don’t even bother,” says Tyreeka.

That night, DeAndre doesn’t come in. The next night, he comes home in the early morning hours, long after Fran has gone to bed. When she gets up in the morning, her son is lost to the world, sprawled half-dressed across his mattress.

“Dre.”

He doesn’t stir.

“An-DRE.”

Nothing. She stands there a moment more, making sure he’s out cold before she leans over and begins reaching into the pocket of his denims, gently extending her fingers until she finds the big roll. She slips it out slowly, pulls off three twenties, and returns the rest.

And why the hell not? He’s living here, eating her food, using her electric, and not doing a damn thing but getting high and hustling on the corners. She’s always told him that what he brings into this house—money, drugs, guns—is hers, that if she finds it, it’s hers to spend or sell or use. She isn’t stealing, she tells herself. She’s taking what is her due.

When DeAndre does begin to stir an hour later, Fran is dressed and waiting in the kitchen, ready with her defense. After a time, she can hear him upstairs in his bedroom, muttering and cussing and throwing stuff around his room.

“What the hell wrong with you?” she asks when he makes his way downstairs.

“You know.”

“I don’t know what the hell …”

“You took my money.”

“Don’t even start with that. You think I’d be sitting here, waiting for your dead ass to get up if I had your money? You think I’d be feeling as sick as I do if I had your money?”

DeAndre glares at her.

“What the hell wrong with you?” Fran asks, getting up and going
over to the icebox. “There ain’t shit in this refrigerator today. You think I’d be waiting for you to get up if I had your money? I’da done been to the damn market.”

DeAndre calms down and Fran gives him a minute or two as he checks the refrigerator and cupboard.

“Lemme hold twenty,” she asks finally.

“Ma …”

“For groceries. You livin’ here too.”

DeAndre grimaces as he peels off another bill.

Later, after he’s washed and dressed and headed over Hilltop on his way back to the strip, Fran follows at a safe distance, going straight up Baltimore Street when DeAndre turns to go down bottom. She spends $20 on coke and dope, returning with Bunchie to her favorite party lair in the basement of the Dew Drop Inn. With another $40, she stops at the market on her way home and picks up groceries enough to last until check day. The other $20 she saves for tomorrow. Or tonight, if need be.

That night, when DeRodd comes down the hill from Scoogie’s to find cereal in the cupboard and burger patties in the freezer and strawberry Kool Aid in the green plastic jug, Fran feels as if she’s maintaining. What needs to get done is getting done, and come the new year, she’ll deal with the rest of it. Marvin and Antoinette and everything else—those things will keep until she’s ready for them. She can afford to let up a little, so later that night, with her extra twenty, she goes back down to Fayette Street.

She doesn’t come home until late the following morning, having spent half the night in the Dew Drop basement and the other on Scoogie’s sofa, sleeping next to DeRodd. When she does settle back into the kitchen on Boyd Street, she’s so beat that it’s on DeRodd to notice what’s wrong with the picture.

“Ma,” he says, holding open the refrigerator.

“Huh.”

“Where the food at?”

She looks at him hard for a moment, thinking that he’s trying to be funny when all she wants to do is go back to sleep.

“Don’t play,” she tells DeRodd.

He shrugs, then stands aside to display the gaping void.