The Corner (8 page)

Stacked next to the lockers atop plastic milk crates are an ancient receiver, a speaker, a dusty turntable, an old TV, and a VCR. On the adjacent wall hangs a cheerful mural—the work of Neacey, Gandy, and some of the other older girls—depicting fairy-tale characters under the leafy arms of a tree.

Between the bathrooms on the back wall is a weight set, the lone bar resting in the metal arms of a vinyl bench. A metal stand adorned with a collage of African masks created by the younger children and a wall poster featuring coloring book representations of famous African-Americans add to the rear of the room.

All of this is spotlessly clean, lovingly maintained by Ella and Marzell, with some occasional help from the older girls. The tile floor is mopped daily, the tables cleaned, the chairs neatly aligned. The depressing weight of the dropped tile ceiling is lightened a bit by a long string of red and green crepe paper adorned with balloons, a leftover from the Christmas pageant. In all, the interior of the rec is festive enough, appealing to the little ones, who accept the illusion. The older kids need more, Ella knows, and so she worries.

A soft knocking catches her ear between R.C.’ s raucous bellows, as he celebrates victory in a game of Connect Four. Ella checks the clock—half past three, not yet time for the little ones to be here—before getting up to again open the rec door. In totters six-year-old Dena Sparrow, barely able to move in a bundle of winter clothing but early as usual because her family lives just across the alley. Ella welcomes Dena, guides her over the threshold, and reaches back to close the door. It doesn’t budge.

“DeAndre, let go of the door,” she orders.

A solemn DeAndre McCullough enters, walking past Ella without so much as hello. Chin riveted to his chest, arms stiff at his sides, he moves with his practiced roughneck walk, a gait of locked knees and stiff spine. The cold day clings to his demeanor.

“Hello, DeAndre,” says Ella.

“Huh.”

“Hello, DeAndre,” she tries again.

“I said hey,” he mumbles, obviously irritated. He stops at the desk and signs the book, then sheds his coat, throwing it casually on the counter. Unencumbered, he stalks past the others without a glance of recognition. He unbuttons his flannel shirt and lets it fall in a heap. His T-shirt follows, the one with the cartoon of a hopper smoking a blunt. Bare-chested and muscled, he swings onto the bench and hefts the weight. He does bench presses mindlessly, with no program, tiring quickly.

“Twenty-five. Yeah boy,” he says, sitting up.

He lifts the bar again and does ten long, slow arm curls. Finishing, he sets it on the floor. Turning to the others, he flexes his arms. “Steel,” he says, banging his chest. “I’m a man.”

The others ignore him, but little Dena, watching from a chair near Ella’s office, makes her way slowly across the room. She smiles broadly, intrigued by the free weights and DeAndre both. The girl bends her little body over the bar and tries a lift. DeAndre stoops behind her and curls the weight up and over her head.

“Girl, you strong,” he announces, helping her set the bar down. He lifts her in the air, and she beams a smile. He spins her around, his face alive with joy. “She stronger than you, R.C.,” he laughs, as Dena hugs him.

Ella watches, pleased. For all his bluster, DeAndre is good with the little ones.

More roughnecks arrive. Huggie and the twins, Arnold and Ronald, bound through the doors, excitement glowing on their faces. “Got that cat,” Arnold announces, proudly, piquing R.C.’ s interest.

“Yeah. We got that cat been hitting our coop,” Ronald boasts.

“What cat?”

“Cat been getting our birds,” Ronald says. “Huggie killed it dead.”

“Yeah, what you do?” R.C. asks.

“Caught that cat and threw it in with Shamrock’s pit bull. Tore his ass up,” Huggie says proudly.

“Shit, that ain’t nothin’,” R.C. says, punching a hole in their glee. “You shoulda got DeAndre.”

“Oh, yeah?” Ronald says, a little hurt. “You should of heard that bitch scream.”

“DEANDRE,” R.C. roars, “DEANDRE, COME HERE. YO, TELL THEM WHAT YOU DO WHEN A CAT GOES AFTER YOUR BIRDS.”

DeAndre puts Dena down and slowly joins the boys.

“Go on, tell them,” R.C. urges.

DeAndre smiles. “This cat been around my coop, trying to get in. I saw him and went and got this pair of thick gloves, the kind my uncle uses with the crabs, real thick so you can’t get scratched. Then I trapped that motherfucker. He tried to get me but he couldn’t get through the gloves.”

DeAndre has seated himself on a table. The other boys, R.C. included, are silent as DeAndre’s enthusiasm for his tale catches hold of them.

“He was tough,” DeAndre says. “I broke his legs, broke each one. Then I tied him up and hung him from this tree …”

His voice drops, drawing the others closer.

“… got me some lighter fluid, squirted that sucker down, then hit him with a match. Fucked him all up.”

“MAN, YOU A CRAZY FUCKER,” R.C. shouts, while Tae and Manny bang the table in approval.

“Damn,” Ronald says, admitting admiration.

Ella has stopped working with the little children. Frozen by DeAndre’s
account, she is slow to respond. “DeAndre,” she asks finally, “why did you do that? That cat was only doing what it has to.”

“Miss Ella, a cat gotta do what a cat gotta do and I gotta do what I gotta do,” DeAndre answers, nonchalant. His response touches something deep within the other boys and they howl approval.

“You sick, boy,” R.C. says, elated with it.

“Cat killed my birds,” says DeAndre with finality. “Cat gotta pay.”

Ella shakes her head. She has known DeAndre most of his life; she’s seen him as a lovesick puppy, chasing her Pooh up and down Fayette Street, working through the agony of that first childhood crush. She’s seen him running the streets, getting into more and more mayhem as he has grown. She knows DeAndre is clever and open and capable of wonderful moments, like before, when he had Dena Sparrow laughing with delight. She also knows he can, if the idea suits him, torture and burn a cat.

The phone rings and Ella steps back into her office. Good news, thank God. Tito is home in California, having gone no farther than a long, all-night drive down the coast. Ella gets the word from her daughter, hangs up and sighs, visibly relieved.

“Miss Ella?”

Little Stevie is at her office door.

“What, Stevie?”

“Can we take the football out on the playground?”

“If you bring it back.”

He races off and Ella leaves the office to spend the rest of the afternoon with the younger children. The older boys soon depart, off on some business best discussed outside the rec. R.C.’ s voice lingers, carrying from Mount Street.

Eventually, the darkness presses in and Ella checks the clock. It’s half past six, time to send her charges home. As a last ritual, she gathers Tastykakes and potato chip bags—snacks that come to the rec center from Echo House, the neighborhood outreach center, and the St. Martin’s parish soup kitchen—passing them out as the kids move back across the threshold, huddling on the blacktop around the dim light that escapes from the windows in the rec center’s doors.

Inside, surrounded by the sudden silence, Ella lugs out the bucket and mop, and begins to clean. She returns the toys and games to the lockers, straightens the chairs, cleans the finger paint from one of the table tops. She looks around, satisfied at last. Then she turns out the light, locks the
door, rolls down the grate, and steps into darkness. Some of the kids are playing on the sliding board, some follow her to Mount Street, where the constant drone becomes specific.

“Got them red tops.”

“In the Hole.”

“Death Row.”

Ella watches two of the children cross Fayette Street amid a swarm of dealers scrambling to serve two white men in a pickup.

She draws her coat close and crosses Mount Street, moving once again through the corner crowd.

No sense at all.

Fran Boyd is up out of the basement early this morning, smoking the day’s first Newport and watching from the top step, her usual perch, as Mount and Fayette begins to stir. Up at Mount, Buster and Country have dragged their tired carcasses to the corner and are waiting stoically for Scar to bring the package. A couple doors from Fran, Ronnie Hughes is out front as well, tinkering with the engine of his shit-brown Buick, trying to get it started on this late January morning. DeRodd’s father, Michael Hearns, waits beside Ronnie wordlessly, his breath freezing above him in small soft clouds. The two are planning an expedition to a county mall, and Ronnie likes to get an early jump whenever possible. Better to get in and out before the security people are fully alert.

“Hey, Fran,” Ronnie calls. An invitation.

She nods curtly, but says nothing. Sitting there in the cold, her narrow behind resting on an old sofa cushion, Fran is dressed more for fall than the deep of winter. Seemingly oblivious to the chill, she looks past Ronnie to scour the traffic around Fayette and Mount, searching for that first thin thread of a caper that can be parlayed into a vial or two of coke to go on top of the morning’s blast of dope. As for a daytime boosting spree with Ronnie and Michael, she’ll pass. For one thing, it hasn’t been great with Michael lately; she can’t remember what it was she saw in him. For another, things haven’t been feeling right in the stores, what with Fran worrying about another charge and security always breathing down her neck. Instead, she settles down on the front steps of the Dew Drop, waiting for a better alternative. She sits and glares, her rock-solid, don’t-tread-on-me visage offering nothing beyond raw calculation.

The front matters to Denise Francine Boyd, because the tough exterior is always an essential part of her game. Can’t let anyone believe
there are cracks in the facade, because facade is most of what she is about. The I-don’t-give-a-shit stare, the implication of recklessness accord her a high berth in the pecking order. And like anyone else closing in on a second decade of addiction, she’s also blessed with a mind that can find angles in a circle. Little Fran, all ninety-five pounds of her, is a coke-thinned wraith pushing the far side of her thirties, making it mostly on bark and only the rare bite. She has a face for the corner, armored by hard-boiled eyes that float in a sienna tea—a cold glare to deny even the suggestion of complex feelings. But behind the front is a woman with a battered, but still usable conscience—a caring soul that time and again proves itself a burdensome source of pain. Fran isn’t like Bunchie, her sister; years of living together have convinced Fran that Bunchie could truly care less about anything but getting that blast. Same with Stevie. Same with Sherry, if you counted liquor.

There is Scoogie, of course, the oldest Boyd, living large a few blocks over in their grandmother’s house. Scoogie has a job and a car and cable TV and air-conditioning and everything else that doesn’t exist at the Dew Drop Inn. But there’s distance between Fran and her brother; she can’t lean on him, particularly with Scoogie insisting that he’s clean now, that he hasn’t been high in more than four years.

Fran doesn’t believe it, and resents Scoogie for pretending to be better than she suspects he is. Still, Scoogie is living head-and-shoulders above the Dew Drop, and Fran is, therefore, by default, the closest thing to a moral force at the Fayette Street house. She’s the one who ventures into the kitchen to make sandwiches for DeRodd and his nephew, Little Stevie, who makes sure the school clothes are there, who interrupts the party in the basement to go upstairs and check on Ray Ray and her heart monitor. If there’s any weakness in Fran’s game, in fact, it’s in the vestiges of morality that her mother planted inside her, that special something the other children didn’t seem to get. But that all belongs to the early years, before her father’s anger managed to beat her mother down, before her mother found solace in the bottle and turned her back on Fran, before the Boyd children followed each other from malt liquor to cough syrup, weed to dope, dope to coke. So much pain, too much to think on right now.

Fran continues scanning the street, and finally, sees Tyrell post himself on the corner, hooking up with Buster and Country. Fran gives him a little wave from her doorway. He nods slightly.

Yes Lawd, she thinks, Tyrell’s down for the usual. Scar will be along
soon and, as Scar’s lieutenant, Ty will then be in possession of the package, responsible for getting it out on the street, handling the money and the drugs while Scar sits back on rowhouse steps and eyes the action. Country and, if he’s lucky, Buster, will do the touting for Scar’s green tops. But it’s Tyrell who will take most of the risk, and Fran knows that Tyrell is beginning to stumble, dipping into the product.

She saw him at it last month in the vestibule of her house; his body bent over, his nose dipping into his palm. Sensing her, he jerked himself erect and tried to play it off. Something in my eye, he muttered, and she just smiled.

Out here, necessity always gives birth to a caper and it wasn’t long before Fran had Tyrell coming around the back of her house after Scar gave him the package, hooking up with Fran in the few minutes before he re-upped his workers. Just inside the basement door, she would shake the vials, skimming some of the coke off the top. Nobody was the wiser.

So now she waits, her eyes locked on the other half of her little conspiracy. In another minute or two, Scar turns onto Fayette Street from Gilmor and walks toward Mount. Dressed in army fatigues, a walking bill-board for his Green Tops, there isn’t much flash to Scar—just a New York Boy, solitary and mysterious, a stranger to the neighborhood who showed up on the corner four or five years ago and began hustling. Nobody thought to challenge Scar because, in the end, nobody cared. His product is decent and that’s what matters. Besides, rumor has the New Yorkers all wired up with heavy connections. Fuck with them, and they blow you up and move to some new corner. No one on Fayette was really all that interested in taking any chances until last year, when the Diamond in the Raw crew started stretching out, declaring that Baltimore was for Baltimore people alone. There were three or four bodies—a couple of New Yorkers and a couple locals—and Scar felt compelled to disappear for a time. But then some of the Diamond crowd got scooped up by the Feds and things cooled. Scar was soon back on post, still a stranger; no one knew his name, his family, or even where he laid his head.