The Corner (32 page)

Gary looks at her, his eyes welling as Fran begins scratching at the scab.

“It don’t make sense,” she says, “the way they’re all so glad to see us fall. My whole damn family is glad for it.”

Gary nods, picking up on it. Even before he fell, when he still had most of his money, Gary told her that he was tired of being used by people, tired of them resenting his success even when he was willing to share it with them. If I fell, he had told her then, they’d like me. If I fell, I’d be just like them.

“I thought this is what they wanted,” Gary says, sounding the same note. It’s a pity party for the two of them; Fran usually can’t stand that, but now it’s exactly what she wants to hear.

“It’s like what I do don’t matter,” she says bitterly. “When they needed something, they came to me. I kept the family together, but Scoogie gets the house, the money, everything. It don’t make no sense. It’s like every-body’s glad we’re down.”

“That’s what I’m sayin’.”

“And the thing is, I know we can get back up. You know we got to. Because, I’m sayin’ just look at us, look where we at with this shit.”

“I’m gonna stop,” says Gary, inspired.

“And DeAndre, he’s actually tryin’ now.”

Gary looks surprised, but Fran nods him down. “He’s off the corner and looking for a job. Gary, I’m tellin’ you. He even going to school.”

“Dag.”

“Your son is growin’ up.”

“I know it.”

“If he’s gonna try, then we gotta try.”

Gary is suddenly elated. He’s the fallen angel, stumbling on a new religion. Fran watches as he gets up to walk the basement floor, poking at the stored furnishings of his own dead dreams, talking about how they can both detox together, maybe get a place of their own if Gary can find some kind of work.

“Be a family,” says Gary.

One hopeful speech and Gary is ripe for a renewal of vows. Fran wants nothing of the kind; but still, it’s a kick for her to see Gary so fired up.

“You gonna see,” says Gary. “I’m gonna get right.”

“You gotta find a program,” Fran tells him.

“I can do it myself,” he assures her.

She shrugs. For her, it’s a program or nothing: “I might go down to BRC,” she says. “They got a thirty-day program. See if I can hook up with that.”

And then, because the dope is there, she does the last line.

Gary McCullough moves through the back alley in his camouflage gear and jump boots, a commando once again on a quest. He’s a step or two in front of his usual consort, carrying the wheeled dolly, stepping heavily in the alley off Fayette, every other footfall bringing a plastic crackle from the pavement beneath him.

“Gracious,” says Tony Boice.

Gary laughs softly.

“Like a got-damn graveyard,” Tony mutters.

Gary snorts an affirmation. The Addison Street alley got a good cleaning from a city crew just after Christmas, but now, in early April, it’s all junk and trash and stench—a dumping ground like any other ghetto back-street, save for the shimmering layer of empty vials and disposable syringes that seems to cover everything. Addison is sited halfway between two major drug markets, and you can’t walk a couple steps without hearing a half-dozen fallen soldiers crunching underfoot.

“Dag,” says Gary, scanning the ground.

Tony steps out of the mouth of the alley onto Baltimore Street, but Gary is still lost in the glassine backwash. He leans over, both hands on his knees, then reaches down for a solitary vial, a Black Top still harboring a white sediment along the bottom.

“Tallyho.”

He puts the dolly against the wall for a moment, then holds the vial up to sunlight. Half a blast in there, right as rain. He pockets the find, grabs the dolly, then jogs out into the street to catch up with Tony. The two drift toward Fulton.

“Third floor?” asks Gary.

“No, second floor.”

“Mmmm.”

“Stereo, TV, refrigerator, and all that good stuff.”

Ronnie had set it up. Ever since they’d started shooting their dope down with Pops on Fulton Avenue, she’d been marking the walk-up apartment across the street. A working man’s place, or something close to a working man anyway. Ronnie had the tenant leaving his apartment empty and inviting every morning. As for the rest of the three-story rowhouse, she figured it to be mostly vacant.

Ronnie was good at spotting a jackpot, and she was even better when it came to planning the caper. Today, with this Fulton Avenue apartment, Gary expects nothing less from his girl than a smooth operation, especially with Tony Boice as his comrade-in-arms. With Tony, Gary knows what to expect; he can rely on him in ways that he can’t with all the others who run capers with him. Stepping around the corner onto Fulton, Gary actually starts to strut beside his partner, thinking that today, at least, the snake will have no say. Hey, you can forget the walkup. They’re so good, they might just go downtown and knock off the Federal Reserve.

A block from the house, they slip off Fulton and into the back alley behind a mostly vacant stretch of three-story rowhouses. Gary ditches the dolly in an overgrown locust bush. From here on, it’s commando mode, with the hoods pulled up over their heads and their jump boots stepping softly amid the trash and rubble. They roll back out of the alley and their conversation falls to a whisper.

“Which house?”

“Third, no fourth, in.”

They slip inside like they belong. They march right up the steps and pause for just a moment at the apartment door, listening for a sign of life anywhere in the building. Nothing. A perfect quiet. Tony rears back, lifting his boot, knee hugging his chest.

High as you can, Gary tells him. Got to get the lock.

Tony grunts, then kicks up like a wild mule, his boot leaving a perfect imprint of grey dust on the painted door.

The second kick cracks the hinge. The third knocks down the door and they’re inside another man’s living room. Gary roams off into the apartment to take stock.

It’s the perfect mission, all form and function as they wrap the small television, the clock radio, and a few small kitchen appliances in Hefty bags and drag them out the apartment door and down the stairs. Then Gary goes back outside for the dolly, and in a minute or so, they’ve emptied the refrigerator. Lifting it up and out of the kitchen, they roll
it toward the apartment door. They’ve got the monster halfway across the threshold when Gary notices a third-floor tenant smirking at him from the landing. His heart in his throat, Gary looks back at the man, then over at Tony, who’s still inside the apartment.

“Hey,” says Gary to the tenant, his voice friendly enough.

The man shakes his head.

Gary waits for Tony to poke his head around the door frame, and for a few seconds, the three of them are standing there with the game clock running, staring at each other stupidly. Again, Gary tries to break the ice.

“Hey, well … I’m sayin’ …”

“You hook me up,” says the man, interrupting, “and I won’t say nuthin’ ’bout it.”

Without so much as a sales pitch, they’re all back in business for the price of a single blast. Gary and Tony are laughing about this new twist all the way to Baltimore Street, rolling the refrigerator with the Hefty bags wedged inside, shepherding their haul through the midday traffic, gliding past the knowing smiles of a few players hanging in front of the grocery at Mount and Baltimore.

A police cruiser passes them on Baltimore, turning at Gilmor, but the two barely tense. Time has taught them that once on the street, they are invisible. The refrigerator, the dolly, the two fiends lugging it toward a cash sale—all of it is unseen by a police department that has neither the will nor the temperament to investigate property crimes. Here, too, the drug war has upended the priorities. Why stop two fiends and ask a few questions about the refrigerator? Why take the time to ask to see a receipt? Why bother to listen to their bullshit about moving their grandmother’s refrigerator, full up as it is with smaller appliances, to their uncle’s house? Why bother to call back to the Western desk to find out if anyone has reported a burglary in the area? Why suffer through anything that resembles police work when you can make your stat simply by rolling up on a corner and going into a tout’s pockets?

At first, it seemed incredible to Gary that he could drag large, stolen appliances from one end of the neighborhood to the other without going directly to jail, but over time, he had learned to gauge the priorities of the rollers working Fayette Street. Most of the police were about the drugs; they lived off the corner arrest, and for Gary and Tony, there would always be more risk when they went down Vine Street to cop
than when they broke into someone’s home. The important thing right now was not to look furtive or nervous. Just keep pushing this big white mountain down the street like it’s no one’s business.

On Baltimore Street, they get sixty-five dollars.

Walking back up the hill, Gary cuts through Vincent, hoping to meet up with one of the touts selling the Death Row package. An alley street between Mount and Gilmor, Vincent Street just north of Baltimore is a bombed-out string of vacant Formstone rowhouses, home now to an occasional shooting gallery or a corner crew using the rubble to work a package. Death Row was here yesterday, with lookouts at both ends of the block and a stash in one of the rotting basements, but there’s no sign of them today.

“The mentality,” says Gary.

“Huh?”

“I’m sayin’, you know, it was his neighbor and all.”

Tony laughs.

“No, really. You think on it and you see, the mentality out here is just amazing.”

“All in the game,” says Tony, unperturbed.

“Yeah, but when it’s your neighbor …”

Gary can’t let it go, this idea that some moral thresholds still exist, that one had been crossed by the third-floor tenant in the Fulton Avenue house. They were out here thieving, true, but it wasn’t from their neighbor. Gary couldn’t imagine ever being so trifling and low as to betray a next-door neighbor for the price of a blast.

“… I’m sayin’ it wadn’t right.”

“Hmm,” says Tony.

“I’m sayin’ he shouldn’t get a blast for doin’ that kind of dirt. He shouldn’t prosper from that.”

“No, indeed.”

“An’ you know that he don’t even know us from Adam.”

Gary clucks softly, shaking his head, muttering on about the sad mentality of some people, about the general lack of righteousness in the world. Coming out the alley at Fayette Street, he spots something in a fresh pile of debris on the vacant lot, something half covered by a soiled mattress.

“Praise be,” he says, off on a new vector.

Tony waits at the edge of the lot, impatient to find Ronnie and get a little something in his veins. But Gary is rooting through the trash
heap, liberating a few scraps of green aluminum and a heavy, grooved slate of steel alloy.

“Gary, c’mon.”

“No, hey, Tony …”

He gestures until his partner finally joins him. Gary points out the remains of some kind of table saw or band saw, battered beyond repair but worth a buck or two nonetheless at the United Iron scales.

“Gary, we done for the day.”

“Tomorrow,” says Gary. “You got to always think about tomorrow bein’ there. We can sell this.”

“Man, later for it.”

But Gary is now rambling on about the ant and the grasshopper, about the smart squirrel storing up his acorns for winter. He looks around for a stash hole, deciding finally on one of the abandoned houses.

“You’ll see,” says Gary. “That’s twenty, right from jump.”

It’s an argument that Tony can’t dispute though he shows his impatience, suffering and pouting as he helps Gary drag the metal remnants back down the alley.

They resume their victory march up the strip, locating Ronnie on the sofa in the front room of her sister’s place, just a few doors up from Ella Thompson’s apartment. Ronnie, in turn, locates a half-dozen Spider Bags and some Pink Tops, and they adjourn happily to the second floor of Gary’s empty dream palace at 1717 Fayette. There, they break out the spikes and bottle caps, bending themselves to the business at hand.

That night, Gary doesn’t go home. And late the next morning, with a sour taste in his mouth, he’s thankful indeed to dig into his sweatshirt pocket and find that half-blast of dope, the one he rescued from the glassine graveyard. He’s thankful, too, to be down on Wilkens Avenue an hour later, waiting at the scales with the broken pieces of an industrial saw.

“What you got?” asks a toothless alcoholic, a regular who’s waiting in line with a half-dozen rain gutters.

“Saw,” says Gary.

“Say what?”

Gary lifts the steel tabletop.

“Heavy?” asks the smokehound.

“Twenty dollars easy.”

The alcoholic grunts affirmation. His gutters are aluminum and dirty aluminum at that. He’s hoping for five dollars. Gary looks up and down
the line and sees that the morning winner is some fiend who usually combs the area down around Westside, over by Catherine Street. The man is fat and happy with a shopping cart full of copper plumbing pipe. He’s likely to clear forty dollars.

Behold, the ants. Alone and apart, they seem of little consequence, ripe for casual derision if not outright comedy. But by the dozens and hundreds, even the smallest insects can move mountains. The United Iron and Metal Company pays cash, no questions asked, as the wealth of the neighborhoods surrounding it—copper piping, aluminum roof flashing, cast-iron tubs, steel boilerplates—is carried off and melted down.

When Gary began living for the caper, there were only a happy handful who knew the metal game, a small number of pioneers who were guiding their shopping carts through the urban wastes, prying loose a few unguarded items for the dollars to get them through the days. Now, they are legion, stumbling over each other in a desperate fight to get there first and grab the most. During the day, they break into houses or salvage from vacant properties. At night, they devour any job site they can find, prying the plumbing and appliances from half-finished rowhouse renovations, then coming back a week later to do it again—so often that most city contractors have to make do with plastic piping in place of the standard copper plumbing. The ants have been up to Lexington Street, carting off their share of the construction materials left on-site for the rehab project there. And to Bon Secours, too, where the hospital is trying to renovate itself and add a new wing. One night, someone actually made one of those mini-bulldozers disappear. Another night, two of the portable toilets. Down at Lexington Terrace, the high-rises have been stripped of hundreds of aluminum alloy window casing assemblies—each set purchased by the city housing authority for hundreds of dollars, each offered up at the United Iron scales for thirty or forty. Uptown in Harlem Park, the good Baptists woke up one day to find it raining in the house of the Lord. And why not? The roof flashing was quality copper—a haul that probably brought some insect seventy-five dollars. Down in Union Square, someone was picking up cast-iron manhole covers. Over in the Westside parking lot, another genius managed to fell a free-standing streetlight and walk off with eighty dollars in aluminum.

The entrepreneur in Gary can’t help wonder about where it all goes. He knows the value of the metals, the copper and clean aluminum, the
stainless steel and chrome. He knows that he and every other fiend are getting a dime on the dollar, probably less, at the company scales. United Iron and Metal is a Baltimore institution; it’s been down here on Wilkens Avenue since the big war, when rationing and rearmament made scrap metal a real commodity. But this is no longer wartime, and the men and women at the scales are not homefront patriots, planting victory gardens and cleaning out their basements and garages for the boys overseas. The people running the scales have to know the origin of all the rainspouts and plumbing and car bumpers; of course they know—that’s why they pay cash, no questions asked. But Gary often tries to imagine the people at the top of the pyramid. He has never seen the United Iron owners, nor does he know their names, but he once heard that one of them lived in a huge mansion up in North Baltimore, way up near the county line. Waiting his turn at the scale, Gary tries to conjure a vision of the Metal King, tries to create a mind’s-eye image of his palace. The business sense buried deep in Gary’s soul has to smile at it: all of us ants working for the king, all of this damage being done so that the Metal King can live large. Whoever he is and wherever he lives, the King is a bold one, worthy of admiration.