The Corner (30 page)

Scoogie comes out of 1625 Fayette.

“Damn, Fran,” he says, watching her bop horizontally. “It must be a bomb today.”

“Is it,” she affirms, with her eyes closed.

The Staples fade, the D. J. sputters for a moment, and the Commodores arrive suddenly to fill the void. “
She’s a brick …
hoowwwse
.”

Fran grooves in her seat.

“There it is,” she laughs.

Scoogie shakes his head, managing a distant smile. He’s the straight one—the only remaining member of the Boyd clan who can claim to be drug-free and steady with a paycheck. He’s working at Martin Marietta out in Middle River and driving this battered aquamarine hulk from one neighborhood mechanic to the next, trying to shove a few more miles onto the odometer before the engine goes.

That’s the workaday world according to Scoogie; Fran carries her own suspicions about her older brother, wondering why he’s always broke if he ain’t on the pipe. And Scoogie is always down on Fayette Street before work, always running in and out of the Dew Drop, always trying to borrow ten dollars for this and that. Fran can’t help showing her cynicism when her brother starts talking that seven-years-clean business, mumbling on about having left the corner life behind after all those years of every kind of drug. She wants to believe that it isn’t true, that
it’s all some ridiculous charade of normalcy. Fran hates the implied accusation in her brother’s talk, the suggestion that he’s better than her, or Stevie, or Bunchie, or Sherry. He pisses her off, provoking her to sidelong looks and muttered sarcasm—just enough resistance to let Scoogie know she doesn’t believe.

On the radio, the Commodores are giving it up to Rick James.

Scoogie leans against the front fender and begins rapping lightly on the metal with the fingers of one hand.

“You leavin’ out?” Fran asks.

“Not right yet.”

“Good,” she says.

“You havin’ a little dance party in there, huh?”

“Yes Lawd.”

Fran is up on the mountaintop today, alone in the universe, looking down on Fayette Street from a great height and finding it tolerable.

She gets high every day, but she likes it especially on days like this—the first warm days that hint of spring, with no place to go and the radio blaring the right station. People that don’t get high—not that she knows many—what in hell do they do on days like this? They have to be dead bored. How can you walk outside, greet a day like today, and not want to go all out, to ratchet that feeling inside your heart up to the highest level? She hates Fayette Street. There are times when she feels like she hates herself. But damned if she can’t put all that shit aside by getting a blast.

“Scoo-gie,” she says, accenting the last syllable. “You remember the Happy House.” Even with her eyes closed, she can see him smile.

“Yeah,” he says.

“That place was jumpin’.”

Yes indeed. The Happy House on Bruce Street was where she learned to be a party girl. Weed and pills and acid. All of the Boyd children bouncing off walls in one communal chemical adventure, all of them bringing their paychecks home and throwing most of it into the party fund. On Bruce Street, Scoogie was dealing weed like mad until some gangsters kicked in the door and robbed the place, scaring the shit out of everyone. From middle school on, Fran had been chasing chemicals and the Happy House, ancestor to the Dew Drop Inn, took her from cough syrup to weed, wine to acid. Then came the dope, with that moment of instantaneous perfection at her sister’s wake. And after the dope—Lord, please—when she got to smoking that rock a few years
back, she went into a free fall, losing everything she ever had and waking up at the Dew Drop with the rest of the Boyds.

Still, for a while there, the Happy House was happy indeed. She conjures up another memory: all of them going downtown to see P-Funk, or was it War? One of them funk bands. And Scoogie fucked up on acid, wavering in the aisle, staggering down to the balcony railing and toppling over, pulled back by strangers at the last second.

“You remember that concert when you almost fell out the balcony? Down the Civic Center?”

“War,” says Scoogie, remembering.

Fran is smiling now. “You was fucked-up.”

“All a blur to me now. There’s years back then that I can’t get to,” he says, and the past-tense tone of the remark ruins it for her. Scoogie, talking like it’s all water under the bridge.

She turns the radio louder, trying to recoup her high, frustrated at the thought that no matter how good the dope is, it’s always this way for her now. Time after time, she has to fight to stay on the mountaintop, to find these perfect idylls and keep hold of them. Because for Fran Boyd, the best part of the blast had always been the way it could take her outside of her life, to keep her from thinking about all the things that she really didn’t want to think about.

Like family. Scoogie, for starters, with his job and his house and all, but always down on Fayette Street. Or Bunchie, running games with the rent money. Or Stevie, chasing that needle so bad that his hands are abscessed and open, waiting on that gangrene while Little Stevie, his nine-year-old son, sits at his feet, taking it all in, learning the corner to the point where he could tell his father when the tester lines are forming. Or Sherry, who can barely care for herself, much less an infant daughter—to the point that for a long while Ray Ray was using a cardboard box for a crib. And Fran, too, living the same nightmare right alongside them.

That’s the worst of it, really—that she had for a time escaped, living large with Gary, bringing home the kind of money that made the rest of the family sick with envy. She had felt that. She knew that they wanted her to fall, that they were happier to see her children have less, to see her back in the common denominator of the Dew Drop. They are family, and on some level she is ready to love them some for that fact alone. But to Fran, her brothers and sisters are also hostile witnesses to her condition. Their faces float at the periphery of every good high, and if she acknowledges that, or thinks about it, the blast is wasted.

It’s the same when she thinks about her mother, who left this world two years ago without ever coming to a reckoning with Fran. There would be no explanations for all of Daddy’s beatings, or for her mother’s unwillingness to shield herself or her children. Most of all, there would never be any reason for the distance between Fran’s children and her mother. It seemed like she just singled out DeAndre and DeRodd as tar babies, offering them a peculiar coldness that left Fran hurt and confused. And then there was her father, who was little more than a silent and brutal force when they were all young, though now he could be found around the corner on Baltimore Street, hanging with the old-timers, lost in his own alcoholic haze. It’s strange and depressing, this feeling of being surrounded by family but in every way alone.

Still sitting in Scoogie’s car, Fran curses herself for thinking these thoughts, then curses the radio jock for talking too much and not playing music. First, she lost everything to her high, and now, goddammit, she’s finding it harder and harder to keep the high itself. The Dew Drop Inn, the Fayette Street corners, the entire neighborhood—all of it has become an emotional minefield for her. Step off the marked path for a moment and you get blown apart by a memory. Like Gary, up the block, looking so damn bad, growing thin on that needle. Or DeRodd’s father, Michael, hanging with the regulars on Mount and looking even worse. Or even the room where she is staying—the same room in which her sister was killed in the fire, the haunted box where Fran can’t lay for a minute without thinking of Darlene dying in the hospital burn unit. For Fran, all of Fayette Street is filled with ghosts; some truly dead, others giving it their best. It’s getting so she can’t think a serious thought anymore without provoking her own anger or collapsing into depression, but still she can’t stop herself from thinking. Not even today, when Diamond in the Raw is a bomb.

Fran opens her eyes and watches Scoogie glide around the corner with Stevie. Going to get served, probably. Scoogie, though, will swear it’s only for Karen, the love of his life, a girl as hopelessly addicted as any of them. Fran gives up on WPGC, twisting the knob until she gets one of the hip-hop stations. Some crazy shit about girls wearin’ their Daisy Dukes, a dance number for the warmer weather to come. She listens to the rap from the distance of a generation, then mutters an obscenity and twists the knob back again.

James Brown. She leans back in her seat.

“Huh,” she says in poor imitation of the hardest working man in show business. “Huh. Gut God.”

“Get it, Fran.”

She opens her eyes to see DeAndre, leaning into the passenger window, vaguely amused at his mother’s performance. Fran is almost glad to see him.

“Huh,” says Fran, again. “You know that’s like the whole message from James Brown. All he say is shit like that—get down, gut God—and he write it down like it’s a real song.”

DeAndre smiles. “Nigga can dance, though.”

“Yeah, but he don’t say shit.”

DeAndre nods agreement, laughing, clearly happy to have caught his mother’s better mood.

“Yo, Ma.”

“Hmm.”

“You comin’ to court with me tomorrow.”

It’s more statement than question, and therefore irritating to Fran.

“Yeah.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Hmmm.”

“Eight-thirty.”

She closes her eyes. Now it’s DeAndre messing with her high.

“And I don’t wanna be late …”

“Goddammit, Andre. I said I be there.” She’s shouting now.

DeAndre straightens out of the car window, hurt. Fran looks over to yell some more but stops at the sight of a single piece of white paper, folded over once in her son’s hand.

“That your court paper?”

DeAndre shakes his head.

She reaches for it and he drops it on the driver’s seat with an air of indifference. She unfolds it and finds a Franklin Square job-bank form, carefully filled out, with DeAndre’s name and address in big, block letters. Under job experience, DeAndre claims to be a volunteer at the Martin Luther King rec. He comes around to the passenger window while she reads.

“Ella say she gonna try and find me work.”

Fran nods, feeling surprised and a little shamed. Since coming home from Boys Village last month, DeAndre has stayed away from the corner. He’s gone to school. He’s gone to basketball practice with that new rec team. And after that, he’s spent every night at her aunt’s on Etting Street, waiting for the home-monitoring call from his pretrial officer. She knows
he’s off the corner, the proof being that there’s no money in his pocket and Easter is coming up. DeAndre’s been talking about needing a new Easter outfit, some Fila or Nike sweats, maybe. Talking now about finding himself a job. Through February and into March, DeAndre has been at his best; that much she had to admit.

“Which courthouse?” she asks, her anger almost gone.

“The big one downtown on Calvert Street. Eight-thirty in the morning is when we got to …”

“I ain’t deaf.”

DeAndre wanders off, but he’s done his damage. Fran is all the way down from the summit, and not even the radio’s offer of some sexual healing from Marvin Gaye can bring her back. She’s out of the car and back into the mix before Scoogie comes back around and drives the Pontiac away to work.

That night, she parties in the basement until well after midnight, but never gets to the heights. In the morning, DeAndre has to peel her from the sofa in the front room of the apartment, then keep her going through the motions until they roll through the doors of the downtown courthouse, their progress slowed by the line at the metal detector.

“Dre,” she asks him, “you got your toothbrush?”

Corner wisdom tells even the youngest kids to go to court with a clean toothbrush, because you might not come home and something better than a common toothbrush is hard to come by at Hickey or the Village. DeAndre shakes his head, playing it off. Still, Fran can tell that no matter how hard he fronts, his stomach is churning. He’s facing a juvenile master for the first time.

“You might gonna need it.”

“Then I deal with that too.”

“Oh, you big-time now,” says Fran, smirking. “You a man.”

“I can jail.”

Fran’s door-knocker earrings make the metal detector bleat angrily. DeAndre slips through unmolested and waits, uncomfortable, while his mother drops her adornments in the sheriff deputy’s wicker basket and walks through again, this time passing muster.

“We in Master Sampson,” says DeAndre as she joins him.

They find the master’s chambers, but a matronly clerk, who barely looks up when the door opens, tells DeAndre to go to the other end of the courthouse and find his name on the docket sheets. He does so, then walks all the way back down the corridor.

“My name is up there for Master Sampson.”

The woman nods.

“What do I do?”

“Go back there and wait for your name to be called.”

“Damn,” says Fran, looking at the early morning congestion on the juvenile floor. “Look at what you got me into.”

They find a bench and sit. DeAndre grunts, then buries his chin on his chest. Fran unzips the front of her sweatshirt, leans her head against her son’s shoulder and tries to sleep amid the comings and goings, her siesta interrupted by the calls of the juvenile division lawyers.

“Wagstaff … Antoine Wagstaff.”

“Emmanuel Barnes. Is Emmanuel Barnes here?”

“Carter, Jerome … I need the mother of Jerome Carter.”

“Last call … Antoine Wagstaff.”

Fran yawns, stretches, then opens her eyes long enough to absorb the scene. There are a dozen wooden benches in the juvenile docket room, but those are jammed with waiting bodies and the overflow is out on a dozen other hallway pews, a sullen congregation extending in both directions around the rectangular courthouse hallway. Mothers and sons, all but a handful of them black, all waiting out their morning on the government clock, empty and listless, using up as little of their energy as can be managed under the circumstances. There is no shame to these crowded benches anymore, no sense of regret for choices made or roads not taken. For these families, time spent on the juvenile pews is as assured as time spent on those warped plastic chairs up at the social service field office on Ashburton, or in that modular waiting room at the school disciplinary office on North Avenue, or maybe on those chrome-legged boxes down at the University Hospital clinic.