The Corner (42 page)

The first Tuesday she makes the call down to BRC.

Two days later, she arranges a ride up to the Bureau of Vital Statistics office in Northwest, where she waits out the bureaucracy to get a copy of DeAndre’s birth record. And she feels good when she hands it to him the next day; she’s getting it done, showing her son and herself that she can provide.

But the weekend comes, and weekends are always rough on Fayette Street. Fran gets up on Monday feeling like death itself, her eyes bloody and stinging from the night before. She gets a wet towel and goes back to bed until ten. Still, when she does get up, she gets herself right and makes the trip up to Rosemont, to take care of business that she hasn’t dealt with in almost a year. It’s been that long since she put Andre out of the house and lost sixty a month on her check; it’s time now to get all of that back.

Six hours later, Fran Boyd drags herself up the stairs at 1625 Fayette, too tired for life. She’s had a day of genuine striving, of venturing beyond the corner and dealing with the plan, of putting the blast second.

“Hey, Fran,” says Stevie, watching her slope into the living room.
Fran grunts softly to her brother, then pitches forward into the frayed cushions of the sofa. She pries her running shoes off and props her feet on the arm of the couch.

“Where you been at?”

“Lord,” says Fran. “You know what it is I don’t understand?”

“Hmm,” says Stevie.

“People who have days like I just had and then don’t get high. I swear I cannot understand that. People actually go through this shit and not get high.”

Stevie laughs.

“I went up to Rosemont to see about my check,” she explains, rolling over on her stomach, feeling the scratch of the ruined fabric on her cheek. “I’m waiting there on those damn plastic chairs for hours.”

Stevie clucks softly.

“Four hours so that the woman can tell me that they can’t do nuthin’ ’cause my worker is off today. Sayin’ she’ll call me back and shit. I’m sayin’ look, Andre is my child and he back livin’ with me and been livin’ with me for months…”

She sinks her head into the cushion, tired of her own tale.

“Yeah,” her brother drawls, “you know I got to get up Rosemont and ask about that check for Little Stevie.”

“You want my knife?” asks Fran.

Stevie laughs. It’s a standard joke around Fayette Street: The straight line says you’re going up Rosemont; the punch line always comes when someone offers a blade. Whatever humor can be gleaned from this comes at the expense of Crazy Arnold, who left Fayette Street the summer before last, walked the half-mile north to the city social services office at Rosemont, argued briefly about his food stamp application, then stuck an eight-inch kitchen knife into a twenty-nine-year-old caseworker. On Fayette Street, the murder tested essential loyalties. Arnold Bates was a stone mental case, living in his mother’s backyard and wheeling his pushcart around the neighborhood in search of enough aluminum cans to pay for his coke and phencyclidine. But when it came to food stamps, or AFDC, or dealing with the general indifference of the city welfare bureaucracy, the people of Fayette Street had experienced enough of Rosemont to give the benefit of the doubt to whichever poor bastard might be trying for a check. Fran had heard that Crazy Arnold’s caseworker had run him around, asking for more and more documentation
to accompany his food stamp application, until one fine day, Arnold gave her all the proof anyone ever needs. In real terms, it was shocking and sad—the DSS employee who got killed was hardly the worst caseworker at the Rosemont office—but in the abstract, the slaying connected a lot of West Baltimore welfare recipients to Crazy Arnold Bates, that most unconnected of souls. Arnold was living proof of that thought in the back of every Rosemont client’s mind—the ugly notion that you can carve your way through a caseworker faster than you can hack past the paperwork.

“Where Bunchie at?” asks Fran, sitting up slowly.

“Downstairs.”

Fran drags herself off the sofa, then stalks downstairs in search of a blast, which to her mind at least, she has earned. She’s been trying—not every day, not all of the time, but enough that her brothers and sisters are starting to look at her differently. Only trouble is, she’s tired. More tired than she’s ever been.

She goes down to the basement where she finds Bunchie well into the game. Fran gets her share, emerging on the front steps a moment or two later, carrying the worn print cushion atop which she has marked countless hours of the street parade. She drops it on the top step and sits.

“Hey, Fran.”

“Hey, you.”

And so it continues, with the touts chanting their products and the buyers sliding up and the time-out calls when the occasional police cruiser lumbers past. The next morning, Fran forgets to call down to BRC, but she manages to do so on Thursday, two days late. The next week, she doesn’t phone at all.

The plan is on hold, the corner world having reclaimed her attentions entirely. Until the next weekend, when she’s on her way down to Kevin’s store and she runs into someone who lets go with the news that Little Mike has actually left.

“Say what?”

“He gone.”

“Gone?”

“He went to somewheres to get on a boat.”

The idea of it pulls Fran up short. Mike gone.

He convinced the judge to let him be, then packed his bags and took himself a new life. Standing there in Kevin’s, waiting for change to come
back to her through the Plexiglas, Fran can almost feel the universe slipping out of gear.

That afternoon, Fran asks around and hears that Mike took a plane to New York and then another plane to Europe somewhere and then got on a boat in Poland. She’s amazed; all that talk wasn’t just talk. Mike’s plan was really a plan. And the thing is, Fran thinks, Little Mike just did it. He went from one step to the next like the end result was assured. To Fran, it seems so perfectly simple: a plan that was straight and true, a bullet-path from one world to the next.

“Mike a sailor,” says Fran, finally. “Damn.”

But nothing on Fayette Street is ever straight or true. The truth that never made it to Fran’s ears was that Mike Ellerbee’s plan was always—even down to its last moments—a wisp of a thing, frail enough to fall apart at any one of a hundred moments. On the night before he left, Mike was down at Fulton and Vine, hanging with some of his boys, when one of the dealers rolled up and berated everyone for standing around bullshitting on company time.

The dealer stepped out of his raggedy Lincoln and walked across the street, shouting to touts and lookouts that they were bitches, that they were supposed to be about his business.

“I know you not talkin’ to me,” Mike said.

Suddenly it was the old Mike, the one who would never be trifled with, who couldn’t stand on a corner and let a slur like that go past him. The dealer walked back to his car trunk, popped it open and pulled out a statement-maker. Sawed-off, taped, and ugly. Thirty-aught.

“I’m sayin’ bitches.”

And bitches it was, with no one speaking a word until the dealer put the shotgun back, slammed the trunk shut, and walked into the liquor store. Then the boys looked at Mike.

“Ain’t got my gun,” he told them lamely.

But Anthony pulled up his shirt to show a.380. Still, Mike wouldn’t budge. For six months, he had written letters and turned in paperwork and taken physicals so that tomorrow he would be leaving the country for something new. He was backing up ten years for the last shooting; throwing down now might mean all that time and more. He tried to say some of that to his friends.

“I shoot his ass for you,” offered Anthony, sympathetic.

Mike was on the edge.

“He ain’t shit,” Anthony prodded. “He can’t talk to people like that.”

“Naw, man,” said Mike finally. “Jus’ let it be.”

The dealer walked back out to his car, turning to say he’d be coming back through and wanted to see what he was supposed to see on this corner. Mike swallowed that too—swallowed it for all of twenty minutes, which was about as long as it took for the scales to tip.

“I be back,” he told the others.

He went home and got the big gun, the four-four. Then he walked back down to the mouth of the Vine Street alley where he waited in deadly earnest for the dealer to return. But the man did not come back, and the next afternoon, Mike Ellerbee was in a window seat, looking down at the Atlantic.

That was the real story. That was the plan—thin, precarious, and in the end, more a twist of fate than anything else. But coming back from Kevin’s grocery, Fran can only see the Disney version, the one that says you succeed by simply wanting, by putting one foot in front of the other and waiting for the good things to happen.

“You got a quarter?” she asks Stevie.

“Naw.”

“Kenny, lemme hold a quarter.”

He gives her a dime, and Ronnie Hughes kicks in a nickel.

“Bunchie,” she says. “I need a dime. Gotta make a call.”

“Gimme the rock.”

R.C. powers up over top of Manny Man to snag the rebound. He wheels left, then cuts back under the basket, emerging in front of Dewayne for a reverse, no-look layup. Dewayne hacks him good, but the shot goes in.

“Thirty-five,” says R.C.

“You got thirty,” DeAndre counters.

R.C. struts to the foul line, takes the ball and cocks his head sideways, a look of disgust on his face.

“You had twenty-five and that shit you threw up makes thirty,” DeAndre insists.

R.C. shakes his head, chews his lower lip, dribbles twice, and lofts a perfect free throw. “There, bitch. Forty.”

“You the bitch.”

“Gimme the rock.”

DeAndre fires it at him. Hard.

“Forty-five,” he says, after dropping another from the line. “Or forty, it don’t make no never mind.”

This is where R.C. thrives, where he is at ease with himself and his place. He’s got the best game on this court and he knows it. Tae is quick but thoughtless with the ball, DeAndre can’t dribble, Brooks is too small, and Manny Man—he’s best off with a football. On this court and for these few hours of so-called practice, R.C. sets a standard. More important, there is a purpose to his time on the court, a reason for being that transcends every other questionable moment. Here, it’s win or lose.

He sinks another from the line. “What’s the score. You tell me.”

“Fuck you,” says DeAndre.

And another. “Fifty.”

Fifty is the name of the game being played as they wait for enough bodies to run full. They’re up to six—R.C., DeAndre, Manny Man, Tae, Dewayne, and Brooks—when the interlopers slip through the gym doors.

Mike from Payson Street. Truck. Twin. These are the boys from Hilltop, the neighborhood due west of Monroe and the Fayette Street strip, the crest of the hill that slopes gently upward from Martin Luther King Boulevard and the city’s downtown. Hilltop marks the frontier of blight in this quadrant of the city, its rental rowhouses only a little more livable than those down the hill. There’s no reliable drug corner in the neighborhood proper; the Hilltop fiends have to cross Monroe Street, or go south below Baltimore Street to get full service. The violence, too, is still for the most part down the hill, between Monroe and Mount. Beyond Hilltop, there is the slope back down to Warwick Avenue, with its greenery and open porches and well-kept rowhomes. This is for the most part a neighborhood of home owners—black working-class, with a few middle-class families in the mix—holding fast to a small island in a roiling sea. In these few blocks, the grass is lush and freshly cut on postage-stamp lawns; the gardens, newly planted and cheerful. On this side of the hill, the residents are tightly knit and very conscious of the long odds against them. They are, quite simply, what Hilltop was ten years ago and what Fayette Street was twenty years back.

Some natural enmity exists between the C.M.B. boys and the Hilltop crew, with the Fayette Street contingent counting itself superior for living at the heart of the disaster. They don’t live near a corner; they live on it. They don’t hear the nightly echo of gunfire from down the hill; they see
the muzzle flashes. More to the point, they know they aren’t living in a neighborhood going to hell; no, they were born into a place that had already arrived there. It was their home that was the stuff of song this year. Mount and Fayette: Get ya guns out.

But in fairness, Hilltop has been in decline long enough that it can’t really be counted as a world apart. When its children walk into the gym, they carry enough attitude to get over. Mike surely knows the game; Truck, too. Only last summer, R.C. tangled with Mike and his brother, beefing with them after C.M.B. moved over to work a package at Hollins and Payson, a corner that was more Hilltop than anything else.

And now, on a warm afternoon in May, Mike and Truck and Twin have crossed Monroe Street. They strip off sweats, lace new high-tops, and stretch against the bleachers in the Francis Woods gym—all of them carrying it like they could go either way. Fuck it, their faces say, we can run a game or we can beef. Your choice, motherfucker.

“Big Truck,” says Tae without rancor, watching the largest of the three lurch onto the court. Truck was named right.

“Hey,” says Truck.

The others follow Tae’s lead. The game of fifty continues, with Truck and Tank, and finally Mike crowding under the basket with the rest, waiting for rebounds. The hatchet seems to be buried, at least until R.C. goes to the top of the key, where he ices his victory.

“What can I say,” he says, half-shrugging. “I got skills.”

A few seconds later, he brings down a rebound only to have Mike skirt behind him and strip the ball cleanly. R.C. glares over his shoulder as Mike spins into the corner for a long baseline jumper. Nothing but net.

DeAndre taps the ball back for the courtesy, but R.C. is there to intercept it. He dribbles off in the other direction, leaving Mike waiting in the corner.

“Ball up,” says Mike.

“Man, fuck you,” replies R.C.

And it begins—a fight that has something to do with whatever happened on that corner last summer, but much more to do with whatever status derives from this rec center team. Until today, R.C.’s standing on this court was unquestioned, but Mike is a good shooting guard and both Truck and Twin are six inches taller than anyone else. For R.C., their presence marks something of a challenge. What results is not so much a physical confrontation as a symphony of threat and counterthreat,
an airing of grievances too ancient and petty to require open warfare, but sufficient to fill the gym with ripe insults. Whore. Bitch. Punk-ass mother-fucker. The usual verbiage boils down to Mike and R.C. leaning hard into each others’ shoulders: R.C. showing his fiercest mien, eyes bulging, nostrils flaring, fists clenched; Mike, a half-foot shorter and maybe thirty pounds lighter, gives no ground, staring back with cold contempt.