The Corner (46 page)

“Ten working days.”

“Huh?”

“Weekends don’t count.”

Gary is stunned. “What can I do?”

The woman shrugs, but Gary doesn’t leave. Eventually his presence wears at her. She tells him to have a seat and wait for one of the investigators to interview him. He waits three-quarters of an hour to tell a staffer that he didn’t take anything from the store, that his codefendant did all the scooping and the guards locked him up while he was reading a newspaper in the middle of the mall.

“What can I do?”

“Tell the judge you came up here and talked with us and then ask for a postponement.”

“I can get it postponed?”

“You might. You might not.”

Gary leaves and the rain again begins to fall hard. When he returns to Ronnie and the hack, he’s soaked. All the way back into the city, Gary is beside himself with the thought of having no lawyer in a county full of angry white folk. The county judges don’t play, he knows.

The hack pulls up on Vine Street in front of the McCullough house, where Gary takes off his wet windbreaker and goes inside to borrow ten from his mother—money she said she would have in the afternoon. He’s in there for six or seven minutes, just long enough for Ronnie to show why she was born for the corner life, and why Gary McCullough, for all his trying, will never be able to keep up.

Looking over her shoulder, she picks up the wet windbreaker and slips her hand first into one pocket, then the next, finally locating the bottle cap. She gets out her matches and her spike, warms the crystallized remnant to a damp sludge, draws up, then fires it home.

She puts the cap back, just before Gary comes down the steps, grabs his jacket and pays the hack.

“Where you headin’ now?” she asks.

“Got to run an errand for my mother.”

“Okay, then,” she says, getting out of the car.

Gary is already headed back inside, half up the steps, when Ronnie delivers the parting shot. “Gary,” she says, catching up to him. “Can I have what’s left in that cap?”

Instinctively, Gary reaches down into his jacket pocket and, to his relief, feels the thing. He shakes his head: “I saved that for later. That’s from my shot.”

“You ain’t gonna even share it?” asks Ronnie, her face approximating that of a genuine victim. Gary turns away, looking down Vine Street, trying to think of something to say.

“All that I do for you and you so selfish,” she says bitterly. “As much as I love you and worry about you and you just as hard and as cruel as can be.”

“Ronnie … damn.”

“You selfish. But that don’t even matter to me because as hard as you are, I love you anyway. I love you and it doesn’t matter how bad you treat me,” adds Ronnie. She’s pushing every button, storing up the emotional capital, carving out another pound of flesh for the absolute joy of it.

“It’s mine,” Gary says finally, as firm and as fierce as he can manage. “I saved it for later and it’s mine.”

“Okay, Gary, all right then,” she says, sighing and turning toward Monroe Street. “You win again.”

His hand is up. In the air.

Donna Thompson can’t immediately fathom it—this vision of the McCullough boy looking blankly at her from the other end of the classroom, arm raised, palm open. Patient.

She asked for a volunteer, figuring that she might rope an actual high school student into a little bit of extracurricular oratory. Instead, and through no fault of her own, she gets DeAndre.

For a moment or two, she stares at the upraised hand, then elsewhere around the room, then back at the hand. DeAndre looks back at her with no hint of malevolence, but still, she’s cautious, suspecting that this unlikely act of classroom participation is a setup. She figures DeAndre is looking for a chance to clown. Or raise hell. Or ask a question completely off point. Or, at best, respond to her sincere call for extra
effort by asking, in the blandest of tones, if he can use the bathroom or sharpen his pencil.

She’s given her query the proper wait-time, hoping for some other hands to shoot up. But now the empty pause is washing back on her, with DeAndre alone and waiting. She breathes deeply and then does what a Baltimore city school teacher has to do every day. She gives the kid the benefit of the doubt.

“DeAndre.”

“I’ll do it.”

Heads turn, but the silence holds. No one is quite sure where this is going, and Donna Thompson is working hard to suppress that part of her ready to assume the worst.

“Have you read the speech before?”

“I heard it.”

“You know it’s for today’s assembly?”

DeAndre nods. He’s serious. Lord, he’s serious. She arms him with a Xeroxed copy of Martin Luther King Jr.’ s finest words and he begins to absorb them, his head lowered in quiet concentration. The rest of the kids are watching DeAndre expectantly, waiting on the mayhem that is sure to follow, figuring there must be a joke in here somewhere. But he ignores them, his lips moving silently through sentences that seem ancient and familiar.

And Donna Thompson can only wonder at the chain of absurdity that has brought them to this point. DeAndre has been deadweight in her class since September, his sole achievement being that he has been present for nearly as many days as not.

He’s smart. She knows that. All his teachers know it; they lament him in the faculty room and the front office. The elusive Mr. McCullough floats in and out of their classes, never settling into a functional rhythm, never completing anything he begins or showing signs of real commitment. Yet they are given occasional glimpses of ability and wit, of the mind that denies them any connection.

In January he actually had a notebook. Blue denim, with a plastic pocket and a couple of No. 2 pencils. For a while, he filled it with copied questions and rote answers—the usual ditto-sheet fodder that the city teachers threw his way.

“Four resources of Africa: gold, silver, diamonds, oil.”

“Define the following terms: tariffs, interpret, census.”

“Who was Crispus Attucks?”

“Madame C.J. Walker invented the hot comb. She developed an entire line of beauty supplies. She was the first black millionaire.”

But the notebook was long gone, left behind on the bleachers in the Francis M. Woods gym, unmissed and unmourned by a young man for whom the ditto sheets and blackboard questions had no meaning. Africa was somewhere else. Crispus Attucks was dead. No one he knew was clocking a roll by slinging hot combs.

Academically, what remained for DeAndre was the symbolic gesture of walking through the school doors, and then—by dint of some modest improvements in classroom demeanor—not being tossed back out by the school security guards on a regular basis. For him, school had for years been nothing more or less than a social event, a guaranteed happening in a life of daily sameness. His boys were all at school; the girls, too. You went because shit happened there and nothing much was going on anywhere else. For some kids, like R.C., television and basketball were enough. If it was a choice between school or television, R.C. would be back in the house after his mother went to work, lost in the animated bliss of X-Men or G.I.Joe or Spiderman until the soaps came on and it was time to grab some buckets. But for DeAndre, that didn’t get it.

Rose Davis had let him back into the school on his promise that he would come to class. She, in turn, had promised that if he would show a glimmer of interest, or just sit quietly and go through the motions, he would be eligible for a social promotion to the tenth grade at the end of the year. Rose had faithfully recorded the agreement in her blue contract book, and DeAndre’s signature had been affixed with an earnest and appreciative smile.

Social promotion was, of course, the endgame for all concerned. Everything else had failed: Braced with multiculturalism and a hands-on, child-centered approach, the curriculum had nonetheless lost all connection to DeAndre’s world. He held suspect the interest or praise of caring teachers, knowing their values would never sustain him on Fayette Street. The promise of taking any other road, of securing some better life through the prospects of a high school diploma—this meant nothing to him. The negotations had dwindled to a last, lonely ploy, one premised on unsubtle bribery.

All of which made DeAndre McCullough’s single act of participation all the more extraordinary. Between his pursuit of a working wage and his indifference to academics, he hadn’t managed enough class
attendance this spring to remotely justify even a social promotion to the tenth grade. As for actual effort, his standard had been set since January, when he announced to every one of his teachers that they needed to get one thing straight: He would not do homework. Moreover, he had it in his mind already that if Rose Davis did not find it in herself to promote him simply because he was on the planet breathing air, he would not be back in September. Yet for reasons he himself didn’t understand, DeAndre had volunteered to culminate his academic wanderings by learning the great words of a great man and speaking them in front of a school assembly.

As he walks with his English teacher to the school gym that afternoon, DeAndre McCullough is, even by his own reckoning, holding to the tail of a long string of improbabilities. What, he asks himself, am I doing here?

For one thing, he had to get up out of bed this morning, scratch together some clean clothes and begin walking east. Not south, toward the Ramsay Street playground and a day of pickup basketball. Not north to Edmondson and Mount for some of that good E.A.B. weed. Not west toward R.C.’s apartment. No, it was east toward the high school.

He had to bypass Gilmor Street and the chance to hook up with one of the crews selling there. He had to step past Tyreeka’s aunt’s house and the chance to convince the girl to skip the bus to Carver and spend the day running the street. He had to get to Calhoun Street and turn—not right toward Baltimore Street and the men selling the weed out of the auto garage, but left toward the school doors. He had to open those doors, then try not to provoke Gould, the school security officer, when Gould greeted him in the lobby.

“Good to see you, son.”

“Yeah.”

Then he had to dodge Rose Davis, who had tracked so many of his absences that she was likely to pull him into the office for another conference. He had to get through the hallways and past the bathrooms and out of the stairwells—all of which offered opportunities for companionship, disturbance, and adventure. He had to survive his first class, no easy feat when Mr. James is droning on about electrons and neutrons, and a couple of the McHenry Street boys are clowning in the back, throwing dice against the wall. Then he had to pass up a dozen other chances at escape—as a hundred other students were discharged into the common hallway—and step into his English class.

From there, some divine intervention was necessary. The kid who had agreed to give the speech had to be absent, so that Miss Thompson, in desperation, would have to appeal at the last minute to the rest of the class. And her class, united in its detachment, would have to leave her hanging there, waiting, until salvation was possible only from the unlikeliest source. Then finally, he had to raise his hand.

In the gym, DeAndre can sense the palpable buzz of incredulity as he’s introduced.

He coughs once and offers a quick, furtive smile. Then he begins.

“‘I have a dream …’”

He takes in curious looks from the faculty and suppressed laughter from some of his boys in the bleachers.

“‘I say to you today, my friends … that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment … I still have a dream …’”

And he’s good. So good, in fact, that the same teachers who customarily mark Mr. McCullough’s report card with a circled Comment Number Five—” conduct interferes with learning”—are now looking at each other from the edges of the gymnasium, their eyebrows up, traces of a smile playing on one or two of the more generous faces. Rose Davis nods knowingly, as if this outcome were certain and assured.

After the assembly, Donna Thompson is genuinely proud, telling DeAndre that he was wonderful, encouraging him to take it further and represent the school in the citywide oratory contest. He’ll have two weeks to memorize and practice, with Mrs. Thompson as his coach. And DeAndre, caught in the elation of the moment, actually agrees.

He goes back up Fayette Street on that wet, clouded afternoon in May with a tale of bona fide achievement, but precious few people with whom he can share it. Brian and R.C. are over at the rec, hanging under the shade tree by the monkey bars, but giving up a school story to either of those two is impossible. Ella is inside, and though she’d be okay, she’s busy with the little kids when DeAndre pokes his head inside the doors.

He veers off and crosses Fayette, heading toward home. Uncle Stevie is halfway to the corner, doing a full twenty-five-degree list on a windless day—the fiend’s lean. Shit must be a bomb today, thinks DeAndre.

He takes the stairs two at a time, landing loudly in the hallway of the second-floor apartment.

“Ma.”

Bunchie creeps around the corner from the kitchen, unnerved by the boisterous entrance. DeAndre sounds a little too much like a drug raid.

“Where’s my ma at?”

“She downstairs.”

He bounds back down the stairwell, then pauses in the vestibule, one hand on the knob of the basement door, wondering again just what he’s expecting out of this. Below him, he can hear the noise of the television: Fran and Bunchie and the rest of them had dragged a set down to the bottom of the house to keep them company while they’re getting high. In the bedroom, in the living room, in Stevie’s lair, in the basement—the televisions play constantly at the Dew Drop, so that lives in this house can best be measured not by ordinary hours and minutes, but by what show is droning in the background. If Family Affair had testers out yesterday during “All My Children,” then you best get your ass down to Mount Street when the same soap kicks up tomorrow. If you heard the gunshots in the middle of the local news, then the New York Boy got shot sometime after eleven, unless you were tuned to the Fox affiliate, in which case, he hit the pavement an hour earlier.