The Corner (33 page)

Gary reaches the scales still dreaming of mansions. Just before him, the rain gutters bring the smokehound two bills. The toothless wreck curses mildly and staggers off. Gary grins like a salesman for the white boy handling the intake, then holds up the grooved tabletop of the saw, talking up the weight of the thing.

“Stainless steel,” he says proudly.

Thirty pounds of it, in fact. The table and the smaller pieces bring a payday of $11.25. Not bad. Not bad at all for the day’s first adventure.

Gary begins walking back up the United Iron driveway, feeling pretty good about his place in the great urban food chain and taking pride in his growing ability to spot salable metal even when it’s buried beneath a rotting mattress. He knows this game well; better than Ronnie, better even than Tony.

He’s not yet through the company’s chain-link gates when the site of the Engineer humbles him. The train today is four shopping carts, each one tied to the next with plastic cords and strips of cloth. The Engineer is at the throttle, guiding the loaded freight down the driveway; his brakeman, a younger apprentice, is back with the caboose, guarding the rear carts against poachers.

Gary stops to watch, his capacity for admiration battling a more
basic envy. Sewer grates, old batteries, copper pipes, rain gutters, steel-tire belts—the Engineer has tapped into the mother lode, the carts rattling behind him as he makes his way to toward the scales. He’s Chisolm stomping proudly into Abilene with two hundred head of prime beef. Or maybe Cortez at the helm of his galleon fleet, returning from the New World with all that Inca treasure. Gary pulls down his hood and breaks into a wide smile as the train rolls past toward the scales.

“Hey, Mo,” yells Gary, “you wearin’ this city out.”

His grand total of $11.25 now seems a little less grand. Still, Gary manages to fight down his jealousy. The Engineer has been around for years, graduating from one grocery cart to two, then three, and then finally the full complement. The man had to be in his fifties; Gary reckoned that he’d been harvesting for at least a decade, maybe more. So the Engineer might be grand master of the metal game, but he’d spent years acquiring that genius. Ten more years of this and Gary would surely be pulling his own Stainless Steel Special into the depot. Pulling his hood back up, Gary laughs again and then scuttles across Wilkens Avenue, warm at the memory of a similar moment.

A year ago, back when he had first started doing capers with Tony Boice, there wasn’t a dope fiend on Fayette Street who hadn’t heard about the treasure that was said to be ready and waiting in the basement of the vacant St. Martin’s school building, a redbrick hulk at the southwest corner of Fulton and Fayette. Those privileged enough to glimpse the central steam line spoke of it with a reverence usually reserved for the Hope Diamond and the Star of India. Pure copper, 7 feet high, maybe 24 inches around—the pipe meant at least $150 cash for whomever had the poise and courage to get it down to the scales. A few had tried, breaking into the school building and struggling with crude tools to rip the prize from its moorings. But the pipe was rock solid in the old boiler, and even if you did get it free, you still had to find a way to get it out of the basement. So imagine the look on the faces of a dozen fiends when the ninja team of Boice and McCullough came across Wilkens Avenue, marching in military cadence, the Great Tube of St. Martin’s resting on their shoulders in all its phallic splendor. And never mind that the chiseler running the scales cheated them out of their rightful due, paying out a measly eighty dollars; the truth was in the black-hearted envy on the face of every other soul in the line. Walking up Fulton, Gary lets himself relive the moment in full, telling himself that even the
Engineer—had he been there—would have been obliged to bless their successful crusade.

These were, of course, the musings of Gary McCullough, drug addict, for whom the glory of the caper was unquestioned. He had been hardcore living like this—harvesting metal and small appliances, chasing penny-ante scores from one day to the next—for a couple years. Now and again, though, the heroin mists would lift and Gary would find himself consumed by a very Christian guilt.

Like with the St. Martin’s boiler. Gary knew what that meant: thousands of dollars, maybe ten thousand dollars of damage to a building that was vacant but nonetheless valuable. In fact, the old school was on the short list of sites for a neighborhood job-skills center that had been in the planning stages for years. Or worse still, these burglaries—where Gary and Tony were scooping up the few possessions acquired by people living from one check day to the next, some of them as desperate as Gary ever was. It was physical; it was addiction, true. But the call of the snake wasn’t always loud enough to shout down the wrong of it. At times like that, he would then swear renewed allegiance to every last moral particle; he would promise to get involved in something worthwhile and charitable; or even—and here was Gary’s daily resolution—promise to go through detox, to get clean, to reclaim the worthy life that had once been his. But these moments would pass, the needful cells would begin to cry out, and then the thrill of a new caper would take hold.

That the thrill was very much manufactured—a product of the need—was slowly becoming clear, even to Gary. The commando garb, the plotting, the furtiveness with which he and Tony ran their adventures—how much of it was really necessary? Like yesterday, with the Fulton Avenue burglary, where all the planning and subterfuge still left them in that hall-way, staring at a smirking neighbor. All that effort not to get caught, and then, when they did get caught, it hardly mattered. All that cloak-and-dagger and a half hour later they’re walking a refrigerator down Baltimore Street in broad daylight. All the hunting and gathering and harvesting of metal—most of it stolen outright—and then, down at the scales, it’s not fenced, but sold off as a legal transaction. There were times when Gary had to admit that the capers were something less than capers, that crime in West Baltimore had somehow ceased to be crime.

That the world was no longer paying much attention to right and wrong on Fayette Street was a fresh and unnerving thought for Gary,
one that was just beginning to compete with the sheer adventure of his addiction. Four years of firing dope and he still could manage some misplaced pride in the daily struggle, in the full-time job that fiending is. He knew that people—straight people—didn’t think of it that way; he hadn’t seen it until he had lived it. But he knew hard labor better than most people, having lived one previous life as a workaholic, as a get-up-every-morning taxpayer with a mortgage and car payments and pension plans. He knew work. And against that, he could say that being a dope fiend is the hardest job there is.

Every day you start with nothing, and every day you come up with what you need to survive. And day after goddamn day, you swallow the pain and self-loathing, go out into the street and get what has to be got. Who else but a dope fiend can go to sleep at night with not a dime to his name, with not a friend in the world, and actually think up a way, come morning, to acquire the day’s first ten? It’s twenty-four, seven out here—always hustling, always looking for an edge, always trying to stay one step ahead of a hundred other fiends, all of them running around the same track. And it isn’t just crimes and capers. You have to take opportunity—any opportunity—where you find it, keeping your eyes to the ground, picking up whatever might bring a dollar. It could be broken metal for the scales, or secondhand furniture for the pawn shop, or cokefilled vials dropped by some slinger running from the police. You have to know about an odd job or two that might get you an honest dollar when time is tight and capers are hard to come by. You have to have the heart to press your friends, your family for a few bills now and then, taking the attendant shame as interest on the loan. And there are moments in every day when some personal charm is required, some honest-to-god salesmanship in the American tradition.

Like the morning after the trip to the scales, when Gary and Tony are once again garbed in commando gear, walking the neighborhood, looking for a freshly vacant house, hoping for some copper pipe or window casings. But the metal game, which once seemed to Gary an inexhaustible source of cash, is becoming problematic as more and more fiends have stripped the neighborhood bare.

They’ve been down as far as Pratt Street and back with nothing to show, and now, with Gary singing gospel tunes in the warmth of late morning, they’re drifting up Fulton. Tony wants to risk another daytime burglary.

“… down on Fairmount, where they’re fixing those apartments …”

“That’s Stephen’s Square apartments.”

“The ones getting fixed up with new kitchens and all. You can creep on in there when the crew breaks for lunch …”

Gary nods, but he’s distracted by something up at Baltimore Street. Tony follows his partner’s line of sight to a cardboard crate, its top splayed open, lying on its side in the westbound lane. Gary jogs ahead to stake his claim, the law of the streets being comparable to the law of the seas.

“Bread rolls,” says Tony, coming up after him.

“They bagels,” says Gary, adding sagely: “Fresh-baked bagels, lox, and cream cheese—for Jews, that be soul food.”

“Like to have fell from a truck,” Tony concludes.

Gary takes a quick count. Fourteen dozen, each sealed in plastic, save for one bag at the top that has been torn open and reduced by a bagel or three.

“Birds got to that one,” says Tony.

The sea gulls, apparently. A swirl of the scavenging birds is hovering above, waiting their turn. But the gulls lose out; Gary and Tony are now in the baked goods business.

“Fresh bagels,” shouts Gary. “One dollar a dozen. Got the good bagels here. Bagel a day keeps the doctor ay-way.”

He sells one dozen to a passing motorist. Another to someone coming out of the grocery down on Mount Street. After fifteen minutes, they’ve managed three dollars.

“It’s a start,” says Tony, hopeful.

They turn back down toward Mount and Fayette, seven dollars light for their morning jumper, still hoping to find the threads of a good caper. Halfway up the block, Gary sees the familiar outline of his son lumbering toward him, gripping a new basketball rim, the netting already attached.

“Hey,” says Gary.

“W’sup.”

“You know, just the same ol’ thing.”

DeAndre keeps his eyes on the pavement. Gary, too. Tony lingers at the edge of the conversation, then moves up the street to talk product with the Death Row touts.

“Where your ma at?” Gary asks.

DeAndre shrugs. “Aroun’ somewheres.”

Gary looks down at the orange rim.

“What’s that about?”

“Belongs to the rec center. Ella got a new rim, but no one can figure out how to get it up on the backboard ’cause the backboard ain’t straight on.”

Gary nods thoughtfully. “You probably need washers.”

DeAndre cocks his head sideways.

“Metal washers,” says Gary, curling his finger to his thumb. “You know, to make the bolts tight.”

DeAndre nods, not really understanding. The father asks to see the rim and the son obliges, then strolls off into the Korean carryout as Gary begins a scientific examination.

“These bolts he got ain’t gonna make it,” he says to no one in particular. “You need the longest bolts you can find.”

When DeAndre comes out of the store, chewing on a bag of cheese puffs, his father is heading for the rec center blacktop. Just up the block, Tony eventually gives up hope, slipping into the street parade on his own. Gary spends ten minutes inspecting the holes on the sagging metal backboard.

“We need some hardware.”

DeAndre nods, taken aback by the “we.”

Ella springs for a few dollars and they make their way down to a hardware store at Pulaski and McHenry. DeAndre carries the rim so they can measure the bolts.

“So how’s your girl?” Gary ventures, leaving the store.

“Reeka?” asks DeAndre. “Reeka not my girl.” Gary looks over at him, surprised. He saw the two of them coming out of the Dew Drop Inn yesterday afternoon. “I mean, she’s one of my girls, but I’m saying, it’s springtime.”

Gary laughs, shaking his head.

“Yes indeed,” says DeAndre. “All these girls got so phat and fine over the winter, you know. I’m sayin’ they don’t even know it yet, but I’m gonna mess with every last one of ’em.”

Ah, youth. Gary sighs loudly, glad for the chance at any kind of connection with his son. DeAndre, too, is allowing himself to feel it a bit, following Gary back up Fulton and talking up all his prospective conquests. Anything to let his father know he’s done some growing.

Back on the rec playground, R.C. and Manny Man wait patiently as DeAndre and his father get a wrench from Ella and go to work. The rim eventually goes up, tight enough with the washers, but with an ugly
forward list. There’s no getting around the tilt of that backboard. R.C. inaugurates the court with a power drive from the rec center doors, double-pump faking with the right hand, then reversing to the left.

“R.C. use that move to death.” says DeAndre.

“It work though,” R.C. counters.

Standing near the top of the key, Gary asks for the ball and Manny Man gives it up, strangely polite. Gary grips the orb tightly, then backspins it off the blacktop in front of him so that it bounces into his hands. DeAndre is half-watching from beneath the basket, showing a vague embarrassment.

“You play, Mr. McCullough?”

“Well,” says Gary, “back in the day.”

“He ain’t got nuthin’,” says DeAndre.

Gary smiles, then cocks and shoots, catching only the front edge of the rim on a near airball. His son grabs the rebound and clucks derisively.

“One more,” says Gary.

DeAndre fires him the ball. Gary backspins twice, cocks and puts a gentle fifteen-footer to bed. All net, my brothers. R.C. and Manny Man hoot and holler, giving the man his due.

“He got a little somethin’,” says DeAndre, with sudden pride. “But not with me on the case.”

“Oh, ho,” says Gary, laughing. “Gracious.”