The Corner (85 page)

“I come right back from the hospital,” he says. “Cardy driving us.”

Ronnie shrugs.

“I swear I’m not gonna do anything without you.”

“Better not,” she says, raising an eyebrow.

It’s marital fidelity as measured on the hype. Having given his oath, Gary leaves feeling relief and genuine gratitude. She will wait for him tomorrow. She will cut him in for another trip to Pennsylvania and Bloom, or for any better caper that she can dream up between this night and the next. The snake can say nothing to him now: For another day at least, Gary has some tenuous connection to a plan.

He arrives home in time to get a hot chicken plate from his mother’s stove. His mother serves him, and he joins Kwame and June Bey and his young niece Shakima at the table. Afterward, Miss Roberta cleans up with sad, tired eyes fixed on the sink. Nothing is said about the man missing from the kitchen table until Kwame breaks the silence.

“How he look today, Ma?”

“He looks better,” she tells him.

“So he comin’ home tomorrow, right?”

“With the help of the Lord.”

June Bey drifts out first. Then Kwame. Then Shakima finishes eating and begins giving chicken pieces to the cat. Gary clears the table, carries laundry upstairs, then slips quietly out into the street, the last thirteen dollars from the Bloom Street caper burning in his back pocket. He gets one-and-one, then adjourns to the basement for what proves to be the best speedball in weeks. Black Tops. A bomb from Gee Money’s crew.

For the rest of the night, Gary is down in the basement with his clock radio and his library, frantic from potent coke, his eyes darting around the clutter as he tries to find some comfort in the soiled sheets and blankets. When that fails, he gets dressed again and goes out into Vine Street for the early morning hours, wandering up to the corner without money or purpose, trying to steady his fevered mind in the cold predawn air.

The cocaine finally surrenders just before sunup, and Gary can’t be awakened when Cardy picks up his mother after breakfast. He comes to consciousness that afternoon, alone in an empty house with another portion of guilt. His mother and brother are at the hospital. His father is talking with the doctors. And Gary McCullough sits in his long underwear at the kitchen table, with a glass of orange juice and two strips of bacon.

He thinks for a while about getting a ride across town, surprising everyone by showing up at Union Memorial on his own. But something inside him shouts down the thought of such an arduous journey in the December cold. Instead, he finishes his breakfast, dresses slowly, and wanders down to Fayette long enough to learn that Ronnie isn’t out of bed yet either. He goes back to Vine Street, takes a piece of American cheese from the refrigerator, wraps a slice of white bread around it, and has lunch.

Gary locks up the house and begins walking north up Monroe Street, heading toward Poplar Grove and the clinic at St. Edward’s, telling himself that he will still do this thing, that he’s sick and tired of being sick and tired. More Clonidine and he’ll be ready. A patch for today and two more for the weekend, and he’ll be there for his father on Monday.

“My name’s Gary McCullough,” he tells the nurse. “I’m in your detox program, but I haven’t been here the last few days.”

The nurse shakes her head. The doctor is on rounds for his patients at Bon Secours. He won’t be in the clinic until tomorrow.

“I’m just tryin’ to get the patch.”

“You have to see the doctor.”

Gary nods politely, walks out of the clinic and feels the chill of late afternoon. From across Poplar Grove Street, the sunlight is fading down into the barren trees by the cemetery. The day seems utterly lost to him.

Ronnie. She’ll be back on Fayette Street, or coming around Vine, looking for him. Gary steadies his nerves, bundles up against the cold and begins walking up the Grove, toward Riggs Avenue and away from his neighorhood. He warms to a new idea. He will do this today. He will salvage some honorable purpose before his mother and brother return from the hospital.

On Riggs he turns east and finds the house without any problem. His son’s girlfriend is out of school for the holidays, and she greets him with surprise at the door.

“Mister Gary,” says Tyreeka.

“Hey,” he says. He can’t recall her name.

“Andre not here,” she tells him, confused and awkward.

“I just came to see the baby, if that’s okay.”

Tyreeka smiles, delighted. DeAnte is upstairs with his great-grandmother taking the last of a bottle, she tells Gary. “I got to change him, but I’ll bring him down after that.”

Gary sits quietly on the front room sofa, nodding politely to Tyreeka’s cousins as they race around him, shouting and laughing. The girl is gone for ten minutes, but when she comes down the stairs, DeAnte is on her shoulder, tiny and new and wide-eyed.

“Goodness,” says Gary.

“You want to hold your grandson?” she asks.

“That be all right?”

“’Course.”

Gary leans back on the couch and holds out his hands. Tyreeka carefully ladles the infant into his arms. DeAnte looks up into Gary’s face, blandly curious.

“He got the McCullough eyes,” she says.

Gary strokes the baby’s cheek and says nothing for a long while. Tyreeka sits on a chair opposite and watches.

“You a grandfather now,” she says.

Gary looks up, intent and serious. Then he smiles.

“He’s beautiful,” he says finally. “He remind me of Andre.”

“Lawd, I hope not,” laughs Tyreeka. “If that child is anything like
DeAndre, I’m gonna have my hands full. I’m hoping he takes more after my family in some things.”

Gary ponders this, then nods agreement. “Andre was rough,” he says, reflective. “He was always into something, always doing some kinda deviltry.”

“Yes, indeed,” says Tyreeka.

The baby coughs, then cries. Gary puts the child to his shoulder and pats lightly, and when that doesn’t work, he looks to Tyreeka, who stands up and takes the baby. The crying stops.

“He know his mother,” Gary says.

“I be right back,” Tyreeka says, taking the infant upstairs. Gary looks out a cracked window onto the front porch and the rowhouses on the other side of Riggs Avenue. The sun is all but down now.

“When you’re young,” he says, watching Tyreeka’s cousins, “you think about what it is that you want to be …”

Gary seems to give up on the thought. He leans back and rests his head on the sofa, looking up at long shadows on the front room ceiling.

“… you think of all the things there is. And you wonder what it is you should wish for.”

He is crying now. Tears trail down both cheeks.

“I’m a drug addict,” he says.

Gary looks down at his own hands.

“That’s what I am,” he says firmly. “Who would wish for that? Who would choose that for their life?”

Gary gets up slowly and zips his jacket. He hears the young girl upstairs, cooing and laughing at her child. He stands awkwardly in the darkness of the front hallway, listening to the happy noise above him, waiting for a chance to say his thank-you and good-bye.

“Andre has a son,” he says, as if saying the words can make him believe it. “My son has a son of his own.”

When a ten-year-old cousin comes in off the porch, Gary struggles with a sentence or two, asking the boy to tell Tyreeka that he had to leave. The boy nods, then wanders back into the kitchen.

Gary fumbles with his coat snaps, wipes his eyes with his sleeve, pulls on his knit cap, and braces himself against the cold. It’s a good fifteen blocks south by southeast to Monroe and Fayette and it’s very late. His mother will be home. Maybe his father, too. And Ronnie—she’s probably hunting him right now. Mean and spiteful and thinking the worst.

“I chose this,” he says, turning down Riggs.

Gary puts his hands into his jacket pockets and leans forward. As he walks, the wind dries his face.

If you want shit done right, DeAndre McCullough thinks, you got to do it your own damn self.

So he’s got the drugstore out this morning, spread out across the blue shag carpet in the front room on Boyd Street. He’s got his mother’s mirror, a clean razor blade, a bag of empty red-topped vials, and about $600 worth of idiot-proof, already-stepped-on, profit-guaranteed, precut coke, straight off a weekend Metroliner from New York. Though it’s after noon, he’s still in his underwear, his eyes a dried-up pink from last night’s revelry. But he’s warm in the stream of sunlight from the front window, and he’s feasting on a breakfast of milk-sodden Cocoa Krispies and strawberry Kool Aid, and he’s taking in the boom and beat from the half-assed stereo, with Dre and Snoop and the rest of the Death Row crew telling all them other niggas to make their shit the chronic,’ cause they gots to get fucked-up.

DeAndre McCullough is getting it done. With a practiced hand, he’s severing line after line from the granular pile, filling and capping each vial in an assembly-line motion. Bottle after bottle, bundle after bundle—he can do this with a discipline and precision that never showed itself anywhere else in his life. It’s a skill. Simple, yet essential. He’ll be on the blue carpet, vialing up, for another hour.

DeAndre McCullough can break a package down and put it on the street, keep it safe and tabulate the profits. To a degree, he can lead, organize, motivate a handful of lesser corner talents. He can arrange for runners, lookouts, and touts. He can set up a stash house, establish a routine, monitor sales. More than most of those who go down to the West Baltimore corners at the end of adolescence, DeAndre can see what needs to be done, then do it himself, or better still, get others to do it for him. And when they don’t, when they fall down, or disappear, or mess the count, he can be fierce or, at least, he can pretend to be fierce. He can stand his ground against the fiends and their moves, against competitors and rivals and predators. He can, if he concentrates all his experience and abilities, go down to a corner and turn the package into spending money.

As a way of living, it’s not much; by the standards of society at large, it’s nothing at all. But DeAndre can do it. If he fashions a plan that goes
beyond the everyday distractions, he has gifts enough to put some kind of run together. By rights, he should be able to get his own apartment, breaking free of Fran and controlling his own space. He should be able to keep track of his money, get it out of his pocket and into a shoebox, put that shoebox beneath his bed or in the back of his closet, and have it stay there, untouched and unmolested.

That’s the future as DeAndre now sees it. That’s his plan as he finishes with his vials, cleans the mirror, and tosses the razor in the kitchen trash. He tells himself that three bundles will be enough to start the day’s sales, provided he can get down to McHenry and Gilmor by three or so. He likes to sling during the Southern District shift-change, risking the corners only when Turner and the other bottom-end police are busy with roll call. In a good late-afternoon hour, he can make more than a week’s worth of aftertax burger-slinging money. Turning off the tape player, he gathers himself together, then runs upstairs for his winter coat, taking the bag of empty vials with him and hiding them in his dirty laundry.

He picks out his hair, slaps a cold washcloth across his face, and slides out into the late December sun, thinking to himself that the other way just won’t work, that he can’t sit up on Riggs Avenue playing house with Tyreeka and the baby. For one thing, he is still sixteen years old, and a daily routine of Tyreeka, the baby, and domestic living is likely to drive him crazy. And it seems to him like the girl is hitting his beeper five and ten times a day, crying all the time about needing this and wanting that.

DeAndre has sense enough to see that it isn’t diapers or Weeboks that Tyreeka is grasping for—it’s him. She wants to know where he’s at, who he’s with, which girls he might be messing with. Today he still claims that he loves Tyreeka, loves his son. But in the same breath, he tells himself that he’s sick of getting her pages, sick of arguing with her at pay phones and sick of being told that he owes her a package of got-damned disposable diapers.

Only last night he had called her, promising to bring a box of Pampers in the morning. But later for that; Tyreeka will keep. Instead, DeAndre walks down to Baltimore Street and gets a hack ride across Hilltop and down bottom to McHenry Street, where the rest of the C.M.B. crew has once again proved entirely capable of stealing his money, messing up his count, and generally turning profit into loss. The lesson is that you can’t remote control a corner. You have to be there, watching over the
sales and counting the vials and keeping an eye on all of the players. Otherwise, you bleed out.

The years of shared history among the crew working Gilmor and McHenry don’t help either. Friendship aside, his boys have got to do some honest work for their share of the package, and lately, they’ve been letting him down.

For starters, DeAndre wants to kill Dorian; last week he disappeared between supplier and stash house with a whole quarter. Dorian was crying about how a stickup boy got him, but he has fucked up so many times in the past that he’s unable to carry that lie for any distance at all. He’s hiding from DeAndre, fearful, but hoping that after a few weeks even a missing quarter can be forgotten. And DeAndre, despite his bluster, might just have to forget. The alternative is to beat or maim or kill a boy with whom he has for years cut classes and chased girls and run the streets. Though DeAndre is physically capable of doing any or all of those three things, he cannot sustain the rage necessary to follow through.

DeAndre also has a beef with R.C., who owes him money and who has already taken one ass-whipping from Dinky for coming up light on a count. Likewise, Manny Man is hiding out with Miss Ella up at the rec, afraid to come down below Pratt Street where he’d have to deal with a long string of accumulated debts. As for the leader of the pack, Tae is off somewhere smoking rock, or so DeAndre now believes. Just as R.C. has been on the pipe as well; DeAndre is sure of it no matter how many times R.C. laughs off the accusation. Boo? That boy’s been fiending for months; Boo couldn’t look worse. And so what if DeAndre himself is snorting some dope on the weekends? Dope isn’t coke, and he isn’t about to start messing with coke.