The Corner (9 page)

Reputation and mystery aside, it is the lot of the New Yorkers—Scar, Primo, Gee Money, and the rest—to rely on the locals to sling and tout their product, and in West Baltimore, at least, good help is hard to find. Scar has a professional’s sense of discipline; save for weed, he doesn’t get high. Tyrell, however, is weak and Fran has found him.

Fifteen minutes later, she’s up from the basement for the second time
today, feeling very good indeed after reaping the benefits of her backdoor confederacy. She’s out on the stoop, watching Collins make a pass by the Mount Street touts in one of those new baby blue police cruisers, when Gary McCullough slips around the corner, his face aglow.

“Hey,” says Gary.

“Hey,” says Fran.

“Stevie upstairs?”

Fran nods and Gary starts past her. When they were together, Gary would talk forever about all this bullshit, rambling on about religion or politics or the stock market until Fran’s head was pounding. Now, between them, most conversations have a utilitarian simplicity. Gary spoke to her when he had something, when he needed something, or worst of all, when he failed to get something. Lord, she couldn’t stand to hear that man cry and whine.

“Want some?” he asks her on the way inside.

Fran shakes her head, thinking there ain’t going to be anything to share if he’s going to have Stevie cop for him. Gary was forever looking for someone else to go up to the corner on his behalf, thinking that a player with a harder look is less likely to get burned, when in fact it’s always a crapshoot. And Stevie—Lord, Fran’s brother might bring real dope back, but he had a dresser drawer upstairs with half a dozen syringes, each cocked and loaded with nothing stronger than tap water, each set to a different dosage—from twenty on the hype all the way to sixty. A mark like Gary would take his eyes off Stevie for half a second and the magic would never come.

Sure enough, he’s downstairs on the steps ten minutes later, his ten dollars wasted and his face contorted in epic grief.

“Man,” he says. “It was doo-doo.”

Fran shakes her head.

“You just don’t know,” says Gary, wounded. “I mean, dag.”

Fran snorts derisively. “Gary,” she says. “You get watered-down so much you should have leaves and shit growing out your arms.”

“What?”

“You a got-damn plant.”

No sympathy shown. Fran is hard; she can play the corner, but Gary is another thing entirely. By Fran’s reckoning, the longer he stays out here, the longer he takes abuse.

“This isn’t your game,” she tells him.

“Yeah,” he says, bitterly. “All right.”

“I’m serious. You not made for this.”

“Yeah, right.”

She shakes her head and Gary drifts up the block, muttering to himself. Fran watches him go, feeling an utter sense of loss. Gary has been out here for years now, but still, on some level, she cannot accept it. Though there is no love left, she still cares for him and it’s hell to see him lost out here in a world for which he is totally unsuited. A part of Fran still wants to protect Gary, but the greater share of her knows there is no such thing as protection. For worse rather than better, Gary is in the mix.

His fall from grace had a slow inevitability, but there were moments when it seemed like a rush job because Gary never did anything halfheartedly. Fran actually cried the first time she saw him on the corner copping ready rock. People had been telling her for weeks that he was on the pipe, that he was up on Monroe Street every day, but she had never seen it and didn’t believe it. Gary had for years been about nothing stronger than an occasional joint of weed; he had, for most of their time together, been down on Fran for her drugging. More than dope or coke, Gary was into his mysticism and cosmology, talking that high-on-life bullshit and working three jobs at once, bringing home so much money. When they were together, when DeAndre was little, Fran spent a lot of her time rushing around the county shopping malls trying to spend it, buying so many outfits and shoes, so much jewelry that she could never manage to wear it all. She just left most of it in the boxes or gave it away to friends. And DeAndre would be bouncing around the living room on Fayette Street with a $100 bill in his pocket—a child too young to even know what the cash was about. Gary would give him the money to show that he could, to make it clear to everyone that there was more than he needed.

Looking back, Fran sees that she never really appreciated what they had, that she never understood why Gary worked so hard at so many jobs. In fact, she had never really been in love with him. At best, she had loved the idea of Gary, the raw energy of this wide-eyed workaholic who couldn’t stop spinning plans for them—plans that had started to take shape and very nearly became reality.

She met him sixteen years ago when he was working at the pharmacy at Lexington and Fulton, making legitimate money as a counterman and then dealing some weed on the side. Fran did what came naturally; she flirted and talked enough shit to mess his little mind. Soon enough, her weed was for free.

But the Boyds were street and Gary was, well, a McCullough. One of those churchgoing McCulloughs from Vine Street. From the first, Fran knew it was an unholy union. She saw how vulnerable he was, how little prepared he was for the real world of Fayette Street. Gary sold weed because he wanted quick money, but he was terrified of anything stronger; then he quit dealing altogether when his mother expressed her disapproval. Fran played at him for a while and Gary was enamored and willing. But he wasn’t hard like the others. He didn’t seem man enough to her.

They had sex exactly once before Gary went off to college in Ohio. Fran knew she was pregnant, but let him go anyway, figuring it was his due, reasoning that Gary had no real business in her world. Five months into the pregnancy, she sent a telegram to Youngstown—not to bring Gary McCullough back, but simply to let him know what he had a right to know.

To her amazement, the boy came back to West Baltimore.

And Fran Boyd had never in her life had that kind of loyalty. She had never had anyone tell her he loved her to a point where she actually started believing it. But she wasn’t the right woman for Gary; she knew that much now. She wasn’t ever going to be the stay-put type, the happy homemaker that he was looking for. From the moment they moved in together, Gary made it clear he wanted her to be like his mother, and Fran made it equally clear she wasn’t Miss Roberta. She was the party girl and she’d been at the party ever since school days.

Gangsters and players and users peopled her world. Yet there she was playing house with Gary, a true believer, a man who embraced everything from Muslim theology to vegetarianism. He worshiped science, too, as if it was a religion, reading his high school physics text over and over, talking endlessly about the great day when he would go back to Ohio State and become an engineer.

But with DeAndre in a crib, the college plans were deferred. Still, Gary managed to manufacture a future far beyond anything Fran had ever allowed herself to imagine. The union job down at the Point became a supervisory position—$55,000 a year—and on top of that, Gary was moonlighting as a security guard out in Woodlawn. Fran had a good job downtown at the phone company and Gary was making even more money with his stocks and mutual funds. He bought the house at 1717 Fayette. He bought investment properties around the neighborhood and then he, Blue, and Blue’s brother started Lightlaw, their development
and drafting company. Gary bought Fran a Mercedes. Bought himself another. Bought all kinds of things for Fran and DeAndre and everyone else.

At first Fran loved it. She tried harder to love Gary, and for a time, all things seemed not only possible, but certain. But thinking back, Fran can remember a pivotal moment somewhere back in ’80 or ’81, a point at which she really had to decide. DeAndre was three or four, almost school age, and they were considering a house out over the city line in Catonsville, a suburban spread like those acquired by the older McCullough children, who were using new money and new opportunity to escape Fayette Street. Gary wanted that life, too; Fran balked. She couldn’t see herself out there where Gary wanted her, tooling around some kitchen counter with an apron on. No parties, no drama, no corners—that wasn’t her at all.

They stayed in the house on Fayette Street instead, and the neighborhood began to wear at them the way it wears at everyone. Soon, the weed and beer and pills were the sum of all days. She was twenty-four and living with Gary on the day she truly found her future—the day they buried her sister, Darlene. That, too, would have been ’80 or ’81 if she remembered right, and Fran was out-of-her-mind grieving at the wake when a family friend brought dope to her for the first time.

“Do a line of this,” he told her.

Three years older than Fran, Darlene had died in a house fire at 1625 Fayette, burned over eighty percent of her body in the same back bedroom where Fran was now laying her head. On the day of the wake, she put her head down on that mirror, snorted all she could of that powder and came up forgetting that her sister was dead. The same friend came looking for Fran the next day, found her, and gave her the same. The day after that, he didn’t come. The day after that, Fran went looking for the friend.

After a time, she got so she’d keep the shit right by her bed, do some of it the first thing every morning before getting dressed in her downtown clothes. She didn’t even know she had a habit until the dose wasn’t there one morning and she realized she was too hungry to go to work without it. Sick in the mornings and missing work, or happily indifferent and cursing her supervisors, Fran kept messing up until the phone company fired her; the union did precious little to prevent it.

When he couldn’t find a future in Fran, Gary, too, began to lose himself on Fayette Street. At first he fought with her over the drugging. And when he laid hands on her, she moved out, telling herself that she
wouldn’t be beaten as her mother had been beaten. Gary wandered off in search of other women and new religions and a half-dozen other schemes—all of it delaying the inevitable crash. And when nothing else worked, Gary chose, consciously and deliberately, to lose himself in dope and coke. The jobs and the cars and the houses were stripped away and, in the end, he and Fran were both scraping bottom—separate, yet together—moving to the same tired rhythms.

The neighborhood blamed her for what had happened to Gary. Bullshit, she told herself. As if the two of them didn’t make their own choices; as if she had some kind of power over Gary that he didn’t have over himself; as if she didn’t have enough problems of her own.

What she couldn’t stand about Gary was the pity parties he would throw for himself, the crying and complaining about how he once had it all and how he had been betrayed. Like today, when he wanders off bitching and moaning at the injustice of it all, at having been watered down, as if anyone out here had any guarantee of fair treatment. Outwardly, at least, Fran would never let anyone see her show hurt that way. With no regrets, she ran her own games on people when she could, and she couldn’t really blame anyone who managed to run a game on her. It pissed her off when Gary came to her with his wounds. She couldn’t make it better for herself; how was she going to help Gary?

For another hour, she watches the ebb and flow on Mount and Fayette, watches as the touts sell out, then re-up, then sell out again, watches as the knockers roll up to the carryout, jack the corner boys against the wall and come up empty. Every day, the street parade passes in front of these steps and every day, rain or shine or snow, Fran is outside to watch it pass.

She misses precious little. Too many years on Fayette Street have provided her with an extra sense, a hunter’s instinct that allows her to see things on the street that would be lost on an outsider. Without a scorecard, she knows at any given moment who is selling for whom, who is stealing from whom, who is about to get hurt, and who will do the hurting. Fran can spot confrontations and connections a block away; it’s her stock-in-trade, an acquired gift that allows her an edge. Like now, when she glances two full blocks down Fayette Street and picks up the outline of a teenage boy—one in a group of four—crossing the asphalt with a stiff-legged gait.

DeAndre. With R.C. and Dorian and Boo, probably.

If he tries to tell her he was in school today, he’s got a surprise coming,
she thinks. Expecting him to go straight to Fairmount, she’s surprised when he peels off from the group and heads her way.

“Why you not in school?”

“Half-day.”

“Half-day? It’s not even eleven.”

“Half half-day,” he assures her.

“Andre, you is a trip,” she says, shaking her head. “All that work to get back into Francis Woods, and here you at, running the streets.”

“My teachers let me out,” he insists.

“Please,” says Fran.

He shrugs. Not every lie need be believed; some are spoken simply as a formality.

“You got cigarettes?” she asks.

“Not for you.”

“Lemme have one,” she insists.

DeAndre ignores her and walks to the carryout. She smolders as she watches him go. Goddamn if he doesn’t think he’s the little king of everything. He goes out on the corner for a week or two, gets some money in his pocket and thinks he’s some kind of man. And it’s worse, she thinks, since he put Bugsy on me. DeAndre thought he’d backed her down because of that shit. Fuck no, that wasn’t the way it played at all. Of course, he don’t know that, the little shit.

Three weeks back, Bugsy had showed up at the front steps, asking for Fran, asking for the sixty-five vials and two hundred in cash that she had found in the closet. Like the other New Yorkers, Bugsy generally kept his business to himself. But when there was a problem, he came right at you.

“Black says you took my stuff,” said Bugsy, using DeAndre’s favorite street name. The dealer was softspoken and very calm, strangely so for someone no older than twenty. Fran still couldn’t believe her son—who had put her in, and worse, she was unnerved by Bugsy’s seeming reasonableness. If he had come on strong, Fran would have known how to deal with that. But the quiet certainty in Bugsy’s play was scary—not only for Fran, but for her child. As pissed as she was at DeAndre, she had to think about both ends. Bugsy could come back on him.