The Corner (43 page)

R.C. rolls away from Mike’s shoulder, then shoves the Hilltop boy backward. That brings up Truck into R.C.’s face, fists cocked at his sides. R.C. takes a half-step backward, but ends the retreat when Tae and DeAndre pull up next to him. DeAndre steps between Truck and R.C.; Tae pulls R.C. away.

“You down the hill now, motherfucker,” says R.C., yelling past Tae’s shoulder.

“Bitch,” says Mike. “I ain’t afraid a yo’ punk ass.”

“You ought to be after how I kicked your ass last time.”

Mike’s eyes go wide. “You kicked my ass?”

R.C. nods knowingly. “Sure as shit.”

“You kicked my ass?”

“You heard me.”

“Man, I kicked your weak ass up and down the street.”

By now it’s clear that this is going nowhere, that these two aren’t quite ready to ratchet up. Truck, DeAndre, Tae—the rest of the troops drift back under the basket, waiting for rebounds, certain that while this afternoon might still promise a good hoop game, a good fight is out of the question.

To hear it with the logic of the external world, the threats and counter-threats sound like a prelude to war. But on Fayette Street, this is business as usual. It’s gut-level knowledge for all them: Two boys get to beefing, throwing words, posturing, talking about how they’re gonna come back with their Tec-Nine, and everyone else stands around for a minute or two trying to gauge whether the wait is worth the show. The bluster and brinksmanship is constant, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the thing ends with traded insults and maybe an unkept promise to come back with a gun or an older brother or the rest of whatever corner crew is involved. The hundredth time someone comes back in the worst way, but that’s what the corner is about. And when the worst finally happens, of course, a homicide detective is left standing over the corpse, trash talking with his partner
about the stupidity of the victim, about how the shooter promised to come back with a gun and the victim didn’t do shit but wait for him. But the cop doesn’t understand: In his world, the threat of a gun would be an epic event, something to bring the adrenaline to a boil. In West Baltimore, a suggestion of violence is the standard terminus to any dispute lasting more than four minutes. People live—and, on occasion, die—trying to sort the genuine threat from the usual rank corner talk.

“Don’t make me come back down here with my MAC-10,” says Mike, playing out the string.

“Man, sheeeet,” replies R.C. “Go get your gun, motherfucker. Go get what you need and stop talkin’ bullshit.”

“Blow yo’ ass up.”

“Sheeeet.”

And so it goes. R.C. delivers his last few insults from the bleachers, where he relaces his new Nikes; Mike is talking about murder even as he’s fighting for a rebound at the far basket.

Dinky arrives to make ten.

“Let’s run,” says Tae.

“Choose up,” says DeAndre.

“Tae and Dewayne. Choose.”

They go to full court, two pickup teams with the C.M.B. and Hilltop contingents mixed. They run wild, with long alley-oop passes, cherry picking, and absolutely nothing resembling defense. But the new blood shows itself in odd moments of grandeur: Mike penetrates the lane time and again, only to dish off at the last second. Twin dominates the offensive boards. Truck muscles down low, using his size. The general level of play is still sloppy, but occasionally something happens on the court to show all of them that, taken as a whole, they’re a better team.

Something else becomes painfully obvious. The marginal C.M.B. players—Manny Man, Brooks, Dinky, even DeAndre—are no longer as vital with the Hilltop boys on the court. DeAndre still has his shot, but with both Mike and Tae running point, his weak ballhandling is a liability. Brooks can’t penetrate or connect with anyone’s passing game. Dinky has his moments—he moves constantly without the ball, crashing the boards, stealing rebounds from taller players—but he can’t finish; his shot is rushed and awkward. Manny Man is barely there.

On the other hand, the challenge brings R.C. to a new level. Mike can see the court the way R.C. sees it; the two of them, playing together in the last of three games, manage to get it done. With Mike regulating the offense, R.C. is rewarded for his rebounding, his defense, his movement without the ball.

Once, after fighting Truck successfully for an offensive rebound, R.C. turns under the larger boy, double-pumps, then dishes the ball to Mike, who cuts the lane for a layup. Two plays later, Mike drives to the hoop, drawing Truck and DeAndre, before tapping the ball back out to R.C. at the key. R.C. pumps, then shoots a no-look pass back to Mike, who’s behind the basket. Mike fools what’s left of the defense, then fires it back to a charging R.C. for an elegant finger roll.

Backpedaling downcourt on defense, R.C. wordlessly extends his hand to take five from the kid who was going to go home for his MAC-10.

“Good pass,” says Mike.

Like R.C., Tae and Dewayne can keep pace with the Hilltop talent, but it’s R.C. alone who manages to grow as a player, to fully integrate himself as part of a team. He’s throwing his body, blocking out, setting piks, diving for loose balls—and sometimes congratulating others when they manage to do the same. At the end of practice, R.C. steps off the court in a rare humor, relaxed, even a little expansive.

He walks up Fayette with the rest of them, laughing at Tae’s jokes, his loudspeaker of a voice modulated to a conversational tone. For R.C., basketball is the only affirmative act in his life. When practice goes well, he can live with himself. When it goes poorly, he can’t live with anyone.

More than anyone in this crew, Richard Carter carries with him a mantle of fatalism of a kind rarely seen even along Fayette Street. In his every act, there is a show of insecurity, a complete unwillingness to accept for a moment the possibility that his fifteen-year-old life might be worth something, that existence itself isn’t a game rigged to ensure his failure.

He has been loud ever since he could talk, literally shouting for attention as the youngest of five children. Before R.C. was born, his mother had fled to Baltimore from Vineland, New Jersey—a last-ditch effort to end a violent relationship with the father of R.C.’s older brothers —settling eventually into a third-floor apartment on Fulton Avenue. The building was a housing project subsidized by the archdiocese, and
the Carter apartment was, by neighborhood standards, well-furnished. But R.C.’s mother, who worked hard at a Pimlico dry cleaner and was churchgoing, wasn’t often around during the day. Carrie Carter was, ultimately, less of an influence on the youngest child than R.C.’s father, whom she had met and married shortly after coming to Baltimore.

Richard Junior lived to be in Richard Senior’s eye, waiting for those moments in the day when he could turn his father’s head with something new. He would sit on the living room sofa every evening, waiting for his father to come through the door. And in those early days, R.C.’s father was a thing to behold, strutting around in a full-length leather coat with a matching brim, cutting quite an image along Fayette Street. DeAndre could remember thinking that his friend’s father was just about the slickest thing he’d seen, a sportsman with so much more style than anyone else on the corners. And for a long time, R.C.’s father was indeed a cut above the usual streetcorner slinger. He had connections; he was buying wholesale, dealing with Jamaicans and Dominicans and the other New Yorkers who were true players in the local trade.

The family was perfectly divided: a mother, slaving away with the starch and steam press up on Reisterstown Road; a father, trying to stretch a gangster hustle into real money. Two of R.C.’s older brothers, Ricky and Bug, took their father’s package—and later their own product—down to the corners, and were repeatedly wounded by gunfire. Nor did it end there: R.C.’s oldest sister, Darlene, had been the beauty of the family, but she was now in a shooting gallery on Mount Street, chasing what her brothers were selling.

A third brother, David, fell all the way, losing himself in a heroin addiction that eventually wrecked both his body and his mind. Four years ago, on a warm October night, a pair of Western District police caught up to him in the middle of Franklin Street, near the McDonald’s, where the twenty-six-year-old was wandering in traffic, rambling incoherently. At one point, David jumped on the hood of a police cruiser; bystanders would later tell the Carter family that this single act resulted in a severe beatdown. Pounded by the arresting officers and tossed in the rear of a wagon, he was delivered still breathing to the Western lockup and deposited in a holding cell. A few hours later, the turnkeys realized they had a problem and rushed him down to the Bon Secours emergency room, where he slipped in and out of consciousness. Transferred
to a better intensive-care unit at University Hospital, he died days later nonetheless.

The autopsy was just ambiguous enough to take the police department off the hook. Citing as much physical damage from drug use as from the beating on Franklin Street, officials ruled the case a natural death. No one in authority ever contacted the Carters with an explanation, and when Carrie Carter went downtown to talk to someone in charge, she was shunted in and out of offices until a deputy commissioner told her simply that her son had died from drugs. But in the neighborhood, the death of David Sanford became local lore, a touchstone to be cited whenever the standing of law officers was at issue. On Fayette Street, no one—from older heads to gangsters to small children—ever spoke of the incident without acknowledging that the police had come across an addict in delirium, and with absolute impunity, had beaten the man to death.

Of all the siblings, David had been closest to eleven-year-old Richard Junior. From Carrie Carter’s point of view, David’s death seemed to bring R.C. to a new level of frustration, to make him shout louder or rant longer in his struggle to be acknowledged. Though he was in many ways her brightest child, school had always been a problem with R.C., who had, from an early age, abandoned all initiative when it came to his own education. She had approached city school officials a dozen different ways, looking for the key to open her angry child’s mind; no one, it seemed, could touch R.C.’s basic insecurities. He was alive only on a ball court or in the streets, where he survived as much as a braggart as a fighter, a loud and profane voice constantly assuring the world of his talent and worth. He was one of the best athletes in the group, and he could carry himself in a fight, especially when he was younger and his thick, athletic frame was daunting to everyone in the neighborhood save DeAndre. But whereas DeAndre had sense enough not to talk up his game, R.C.’s wounded ego couldn’t contain itself. He abhorred silence, yet all of his protestations and declarations accomplished little. It was as if all the self-praise seeped out a hole in the bottom of his soul.

When his father—the patriarch behind the family disaster—began hardcore drugging, things only got worse. For the last two years, Richard Senior had moved through life as an empty shell of himself, the tailored suits and full-length leathers giving way to the ordinariness of common addiction. By then he had little time for his youngest son. He had run
the gangster hustle down to its last threads, messing up deals and packages as only a fiend can. Then, just before last Christmas, he crossed some Jamaicans and it was over. They found his body in the wilds of West Baltimore’s Leakin Park. He had been badly bludgeoned, his sweatshirt pulled up over his head to prevent him from fighting back, his head and torso black-and-blue from the blows. The murder was never solved; in fact, it wasn’t seriously investigated. Saddled with the possibility of an unsolvable drug slaying, city detectives convinced the medical examiner to list the case as pending, on the apparent presumption that the victim had wandered into the woods, pulled his sweatshirt above his head and then beaten himself into the ground. Again, as with David Sanford, the fact that there was heroin in the dead man’s system was explanation enough.

That was five months ago. Now R.C. is in freefall; he no longer even bothers to maintain any pretense. Charged with truancy from the previous semester at Southwestern, he began the new semester promising a juvenile hearing officer he wouldn’t miss a day if his transfer to Francis M. Woods was approved. With only a month to go, he has amassed a near-perfect attendance record—he has not been seen at school save for the first two days of the spring semester. He makes no show of looking for a job, nor does he have need of one. His mother has been giving him a portion of his father’s social security death benefit, enabling R.C. to indulge in consumption that outpaces that of his contemporaries. For the poorest of the C.M.B. crew, Nike and Reebok, Timberland, and Tommy Hilfiger are components of a basic philosophy of life. To Tae or DeAndre, the worst insult is to have anything attached to you—your jacket, your high-tops, your girl, your hair—labeled as off-brand. But R.C. is a step beyond. In his bedroom, there are close to thirty-five pairs of brand-name athletic shoes, some rarely worn, others still in the original boxes. And yet the mall purchases, too, leak uselessly from that hole inside him.

In the end, it’s a matter of degree: All of them—DeAndre, Tae, Manny Man, Brooks, Dinky—are slipping slowly into the corner world. But most are at the same time clinging to the last leavings of childhood, still making the effort in their minds to assemble the fragments of school, family, and hope into vague, improbable futures. But R.C. can no longer manage even a show of reluctance about the corner. He doesn’t fight it; he seems to be going there deliberately.

For R.C., basketball is the only thing in his life that hasn’t imploded,
that can be trusted to remain a constant. On the court, he is gifted. Too short to dominate, but capable of playing within himself as the others are not, he has strong moves, good court vision, a physical game, and—most important—he understands instinctively what a basketball team is supposed to do with or without the ball. That he is playing with so many who don’t is enormously frustrating. Still, the rec center team is precious to him.

The contradiction here makes R.C.’s effort in the Francis Woods gym seem transcendent: As the rest of his life settles inexorably onto the corner, a place where only the most self-centered and temporary passions are gratified, R.C. nonetheless takes the time three days a week to dedicate himself to the communal requirements of team basketball. He rebounds without reward; passes the ball without hope that it will come back; takes only those shots that offer a high percentage. The Hilltop boys notice, of course, but for the others—DeAndre, Tae, and the rest—their time on the court is mere play.