The Corner (37 page)

“Ol’ man river,” sings June Bey, trying hard for a stereotype. He slogs into the trashed garage, pulling out pieces of a broken oven and tossing them into the pile. Then he pulls off his knitted cap, wipes his head and saunters a few steps down Vine, telling himself that the job is more than half finished. He starts toward the far corner, wondering if Curt and Hungry know something he doesn’t, if maybe there’s a tester line down on Fulton.

“June Bey!”

His mother’s voice. June Bey turns abruptly on his heels and winces, one swollen hand raised in a gesture of mollification. He tries to smile back through the window, his eyes glancing off Roberta McCullough’s fretful face.

“William,” she says, cracking the storm door and resorting to for malities. “Where you goin’?”

“Nowhere.”

“You know that you not close to done yet.”

“Yes’m,” says June Bey. “But I will be. I will be done, on earth as I am in heaven.”

He’s responsible not only for the small patch of pavement behind the McCullough rowhouse, but the garages on the north side of Vine to
boot. He’s doing his mother’s bidding today: removing the dump piles, bagging the trash, sweeping the dog and rat droppings out from the corners of the empty garages. Alas for June Bey McCullough, a prodigal son suddenly in his mother’s eye; it’s spring, and along Fayette Street, that means spring cleaning.

In these fine late-April days, it’s not just June Bey, but the whole neighborhood that is engaged in a ritual echoing from some earlier epoch, some time and place in which seasonal renewal was still a possibility. Now, with the sun warm on the Formstone and asphalt, the men and women along Fayette Street—even some of those long narcotized—are feeling the gentle sway. The days of communal litter marches and clean-block campaigns may be a generation gone, but the trace memory is still there in the season’s warm breezes.

Around the corner, Blue is out on the front steps of his broken home, going through the only possessions that still have any meaning for him. With almost reverential care, he opens up his satchel and art supply box, then begins sorting his brushes, pencils, and drawing pads, taking inventory and preparing for the season to come.

The jail time cleared his head enough to allow him to hear a voice inside screaming to put a stop to all this nonsense. And Blue was able to abide that voice, for a short time at least. A month earlier, he had come home to his brother’s house on the other side of the boulevard, where his brother had a working phone and the pretrial division was therefore able to place him on home monitor. But his brother had limited patience and soon enough, with no other location at which he might be detained, Blue was returned to the city jail. A week or so back, when the jail finally kicked him loose, they forgot to take the home-monitoring bracelet from his wrist. Now, he’s back in the mix, still wearing his state-supplied jewelry as if it can pass as a corner fashion.

For Blue, it’s back to square one, though the better half of his nature uses the early part of this day to take stock of his art supplies and talk to himself about scrounging up some sign-painting business, maybe even opening up a shop of his own in one of the vacant storefronts down on Pratt Street. Change is in the breeze, and Blue, though the same as he ever was, still feels the need to clean house.

“Hey,” says Eggy Daddy, cruising up with Scalio.

“Mmm hmm,” offers Blue, replacing the satchel’s contents.

“Where you goin’ at?”

“Down Pratt Street,” says Blue, flush with purpose.

“Not now you ain’t. We’re sick.”

Blue smiles. After the usual suspects began tearing down Annie’s house, she made the supreme effort of forcing the shooting gallery to move once again, and so, Blue came home from courtside to a crowded house. Today, though, Rita isn’t around, having come out of her lair to hunt down some antibiotics for her arms.

“Awright,” he tells the two. “Go on inside and I’ll be with you.”

He picks up the satchel and follows, then returns to the steps a few minutes later, once again prepared for the sortie to the Pratt Street shops. “Hey, what can I say?” he tells no one in particular. “I’m a doctor.”

Blue starts again across Fayette, but this time it’s Fat Curt and Hungry coming at him, with Curt holding a bottle of wine. An hour earlier, three white boys had pulled up in a Ford Escort, made the connect with Curt, and had given him eight dollars for the trouble. It was enough for a Spider Bag, so Blue goes back inside his house and hits them with it, and only then does he make his way out the door and down the hill to the commercial strip with the satchel of new business slung heavy across his shoulder, thinking to himself that beginnings are always harder than they seem.

Another seasonal cleaning is taking place a block down Fayette Street, this one courtesy of the Franklin Square civic leadership. Down near the Mount Street corners, an old fiend named Gene lays claim to the most broke-down needle palace and it’s his misfortune to be at 1702 Fayette, directly across the street from the Echo House community center. By virtue of that geography, Gene is about to be seasonally adjusted, though he doesn’t know it yet. Across the street, out in front of Echo House, Joyce Smith and Myrtle Summers are standing with a young attorney from a legal aid group, taking stock of the wreckage at 1702 and wondering whether it might be possible to have the place condemned.

As officers of the Franklin Square board, Joyce and Myrtle are what remains of bedrock in the Fayette Street community; they are therefore more inspired than the average resident when it comes to the spring rites. Myrtle, for one, has been keeping an eye on Gene’s battered shooting gallery for months now and she’s been talking to people about the public nuisance statute, a relatively new section of civil code that allows the city to take control of properties that have become the source of chronic criminal problems. If Joyce and Myrtle can get the Western District commanders to raid 1702 Fayette, they’ll surely come up with some drugs. And if they do that much, then the city might be able to take the
rowhouse and put it to some better use. Myrtle is thinking about a men’s shelter.

Around the corner from Gene’s, Ella has shut down the rec center on this Friday afternoon so she can haul every stick of furniture to one side of the bunker and scrub and polish the walls and floors to a more perfect gloss.

She’s got Marzell and Neacey helping her, with Neacey employed for the cost of lunch at McDonald’s.

“Can Tosha get lunch, too?” asks Neacey.

“Is Tosha working with us?” asks Ella.

“No. She up at her mother’s house.”

Ella gives Neacey a look.

“Miss Ella, I was just askin’ is all.”

To the north on Lexington Street, the urban renewal project is now in full swing, with yet another nonprofit developer using government money to rehab a few dozen vacant rowhouses, proving once again that while no social problem can be solved, there is always money enough to gild a ghetto. Few along Fayette Street will be able to afford the rehabbed houses. Those with money enough for the mortgages will be from outside the neighborhood, and, naturally, when many of them get a look at the mayhem of the corners, they’ll decide to own a home elsewhere. But it’s spring, and the contractors are as busy dreaming of rebirth as everyone else in the neighborhood.

Farther down Lexington, Rose Davis and the rest of the faculty at Francis Woods are doing some housekeeping of their own, dusting off the attendance rolls and discovering just how many dozens of their charges have effectively ceased to be students. The warning letters are about to begin rolling out: DeAndre will get a couple from his math and science teachers; R.C. will hit for the cycle, getting you’re-going-to-fail notices in all four of his core courses, with every teacher unable to evaluate his work because, well, they don’t quite know who or where Richard Carter is or when he might actually appear in a classroom.

On the other side of Fayette Street, Fran Boyd feels enough spring in her blood to spend a day primping and dressing in one of her old downtown business suits, readying herself for a grandmother’s funeral she has determined not to miss. She’s had her hair done and now looks like a creature visiting from another world entirely. All the regulars at the Dew Drop Inn notice, a few actually going out of their way to say something kind. Scoogie comes around with his car to pick her up
for the church services, leaving the rest of the Boyd family behind to contemplate their own inertia.

“I don’t do funerals,” Bunchie declares.

“Fran looked good though,” says Sherry.

Although the Boyd clan is hard into the game by late afternoon, there are other signs of spring at the Dew Drop. DeAndre shows up with a dog, a small pit bull purchased from a litter for a few dollars. He ties the animal to a chain-link fence in the rear alley and begins feeding it lovingly, then washes it, then feeds it again. A boy and his dog on a warm afternoon.

“He loves me,” DeAndre says.

“He don’t know you,” his neighbor Malik assures him.

“Yes he do,” says DeAndre. “He knows me ’cause I feed him.”

Later that day at the Dew Drop, Skip makes an appearance fresh from the Mount Street tester line, grandly attired in a grey tweed sports coat and pleated slacks, his shoes spit-shined, his freshly manicured hands gripping a crushed leather briefcase, an afternoon newspaper tucked under one arm. Skip, who’s been living in a vacant house on Fulton Avenue, now looks as if he’s just stepped out of the Legg Mason Tower downtown.

“What’s up?” asks Stevie, impressed.

“Job interview,” says Skip casually.

“Huh?”

“Only chumps go out and soldier in the warm weather,” explains Skip, who nearly froze to death on Fulton in the winter months. “Time for me to put this ridiculousness behind me and do something new.”

Stevie can only wonder at such a notion. Skip, like Gary McCullough, is the rarest breed out here, the thinking man’s dope fiend. His last full-time position was as an executive assistant to a vice president at the Urban League—a nice gig until the boss came in after lunch one afternoon and found him drooling on his desk in a twenty-on-the-hype nod. But it’s the season of new beginnings, and more than anyone out here, Skip can walk the walk and talk the talk. He’ll need a new résumé, he tells Stevie as they go upstairs to fire, but that can wait. Tester first, then the vitae.

Of course, a week or two from now DeAndre’s dog will be stolen off the fence, just as Skip will be back down at Westside Shopping Center wearing his am-homeless-please-help cardboard sign, just as Blue will put his brushes and pencils away and go back to hardcore doping. The
Vine Street garages will soon be a littered dumping ground again, just as Rose Davis will take back half the discards in her usual charitable fashion, just as Ella will stare at the rec center floor and wonder when she last scrubbed up the scuff marks and finger paint. And up at Gene’s, the police will, eventually, kick down the door at the behest of the neighborhood association, raid one shooting gallery among dozens, and—by some perverse cosmic anomaly—come up absolutely empty. Not a spike. Not a bag. Not a vial. The police will shrug it off and move to new business, though Fayette Street fiends, in their awe and wonder, will rechristen the proprietor as Clean Gene, the man with the only shotless shooting gallery in West Baltimore.

But all of that is in the future. Now, with April ripe, the seasonal themes of rebirth and repair are marked on Fayette Street by one small epiphany after another, each more absurd and useless than the next. And layered atop all of it is the police department’s own spring cleaning of the corners from Monroe to Mount, an effort that has no more lasting effect than any of the others. But for now, at least, the Fayette Street crews are chased and herded daily by every roller, knocker, and jump-out squad that the department can spare.

This, too, is at the behest of Myrtle Summers and Joyce Smith, who for the last month or two have made a habit of visiting the Western District and registering their displeasure. As president of the neighborhood group, Joyce made one appointment with the Western’s major, and when he failed to post and sent only his community relations sergeant, she made another. And another. Finally, faced with a persistence that any government minion can recognize, the Western commander fully acknowledged the ladies from Fayette Street as the squeaking wheels they were. Lubrication came in the form of the ubiquitious Bob Brown, other uniformed officers, the Western’s drug enforcement unit, and even some manpower from the Violent Crimes Task Force downtown.

As June Bey clears the garage, and Ella mops down her rec-center floor, the Baltimore Police Department does similar duty at Fayette and Mount, pushing the drug traffic down to Gilmor or up to Monroe for a time, making it possible for Myrtle, at least, to go from the front door of Echo House to St. Martin’s without being proferred a vial or two. After so many police sweeps, it’s understood by all concerned that the crews will open shop a block or two away, just as it’s understood that the police sweeps must come to an end with the dealers returning to the usual terrain.

Still, it’s spring and the Western commanders observe the seasonal rite by putting two additional foot patrolmen at Fayette and Monroe during the day shift, pushing the drugs off Vine and around the block onto Fulton. Bob Brown, Jenerette, and a handful of others take up the slack at the other end of the strip, sweeping the Mount Street corners for easy arrests. The crews migrate down the street and around the block to Baltimore and Gilmor, and the change in territory pushes competing products into proximity with each other, changing the distribution patterns. For years now, territory has been a dead concept in Baltimore’s drug markets; anyone with a good product can set up shop, hire local fiends for touts, and share the same real estate as half a dozen other crews. But pressed by the police, the sprawl of the neighborhood drug bazaar is quickly compressed, so that more and more players—touts, slingers, stickup boys, burn artists—are hustling in a smaller space. There is a crossing of the corners’ electrical currents: Dealers are more volatile than usual, the fiends, more desperate and nervous.