The Corner (66 page)

But all that can wait. Right now she’s earned this triumph. She accepts compliments and plaudits from every fiend who stumbles up, promising any and all takers that she can talk to Antoinette for them, that if they want, they can get down to BRC and start on the same road.

The commotion finally brings DeAndre, shirtless and shoeless, out
of the back bedroom and down the apartment stairs. He looks her over and manages a quick, affirming nod, carrying it all with an air of business as usual.

“Come here, boy!” Fran yells.

Finally her son’s smile breaks wide.

“I need a welcome home.”

Fran takes one last, long hug before going up the front stairs of the Dew Drop. But the apartment, and the bedroom in particular, seem like another world to her now. This is the hole out of which she climbed.

Bunchie’s man, Alfred, lopes across the front room on his way downstairs from the upper apartment.

“Hey Fran.”

Spoken as if she’d never really been away. As if she’d gone to the store or something. She stands there for a minute or two more, looking around, wondering why she bothered to come upstairs in the first place.

“Dre!” she shouts, making her way back down.

He’s waiting in the vestibule.

“Just get what you need,” she tells him. “I’ll come back and pack the rest of it up later. I can’t go in that place now.”

She heads back out to be rescued by sunlight. She’s on the steps where she spent all those hours, all those days and months and years, but now she can’t imagine how she lived this way and how the rest of them continue to live this way.

She shakes it off and heads up the block, resuming her victory lap.

“Lookin’ good, Fran,” says Ronnie Hughes.

“Feelin’ good,” she answers.

She walks toward the corner store, passing R. C.’ s sister, Darlene, who compliments her as well.

“Wish they’d take me,” Darlene says, smiling.

“I can call for you.”

“Would you?”

Fran buys a Snow-Kone from the Korean, then takes a quarter from the change to the pay phone beside the store. The plan is to get in touch with that lady from the rental agency, see if she can get one of the apartments in the 1500 block. It’s only a block away on the same strip, but for Fran, having control of even two or three rooms would be a vast improvement.

“Is Miss Churchill in?”

She waits for a moment, breathing softly into the phone, watching the touts hustle a short line of souls into the alley across Mount.

“Can you tell her Denise Boyd called?”

The fiends pop out of the alley one by one, each of them serviced, each now bounding away.

“B-O-Y-D … Uh huh … Thank you.”

She recrosses Mount, getting as far as the vacant house on the corner before Buster is at her heels, yapping like a crazed toy terrier.

“Gimme my shit! Gimme my shit! Gimme my shit!”

Fran laughs, thinking it’s some kind of welcome-home joke.

“You took my shit! You took my shit!”

Fran glares at him incredulously. But she knows it’s real now and keeps walking. In a moment, she’s inside the Dew Drop’s vestibule, with nowhere to go and Buster out on the stoop, barking like a mutt.

“She took my shit!” he yells.

His accusation brings the corner crowd running, creating a rogue’s gallery of twenty or thirty bystanders intent on seeing a show. The Mount Street dealers arrive; Scar and Man and two or three others. Court is in session.

“She took my shit.”

Fran steps out of the vestibule, facing the dealers down on the Dew Drop steps. “I didn’t take shit. He lyin’.”

Buster states his case. His vials were hidden in the pay phone coin return. Fran used the phone; the vials are missing. Ergo: “She got my shit. She got my shit.”

Fran is disgusted, but also at a loss for what to say. She’s no longer in the game; she no longer has the energy. She half sighs as she turns to her judges.

“I jus’ came home clean. Twenty-eight days clean. You think I’m gonna come home and the first thing I’m gonna do is steal his raggedy-ass shit? You gone crazy.”

DeAndre comes running down the stairs, a surprise witness, interposing himself between Buster and his mother. He stares the tout down, his nostrils flaring, his fists tight at his side.

The dealers look at DeAndre and Fran and Buster and don’t know what to think. Maybe she took it, maybe Buster is running a game. In either case, it’s neither the time nor the place.

“C’mon,” says Man.

The dealers walk away. A hung jury.

Fran is shaken. She tells DeAndre to go back upstairs and finish getting those few things together. She’s still out on the steps, gathering herself, when Darlene sidles up to offer comfort.

“Buster always lyin’ like that,” Darlene assures her. “He probably took the shit hisself.”

“He doin’ it all the time,” says Fran. “But they all lookin’ at me like the shit’s in my pocket.”

“Buster just tryin’ to have someone to blame.”

“I know it,” Fran says. “He ignorant as shit.”

Darlene wanders off and Fran needs exactly a minute to solve the riddle. If Darlene alone believes her innocent, then Darlene has reason to believe. The girl was over by the phone before Fran made the call; now she’s here with me, being so nice. Sheeeet.

“Dre!”

He comes downstairs with a few items in a plastic bag.

“Goin’ up Scoogie’s,” she says, standing up and dusting off her denims. “And I swear, I ain’t never comin’ back down here.”

“I understand you been losin’,” their new coach tells them. “Well my teams don’t lose.”

He pauses to let the idea echo through the gym.

“My teams don’t lose,” he says again.

On the bleachers, the Martin Luther King basketball squad falls into an uncomfortable silence. He has been talking for almost ten minutes now—longer by about eight and a half minutes than any previous coach has been allowed to talk. They are not accustomed to listening; they do it warily.

“My name, for those of you I don’t know, is Derek Shorts. But I go by Pumpkin …”

Brooks and Manny Man stumble through the doors of the gym, Manny laughing and Brooks dribbling one of the rec center balls. “Hey, hey, hey,” says Pumpkin.

Manny looks over. Brooks goes under one of the side-court baskets for a reverse layup.

“Hey,” shouts Pumpkin.

Brooks gets his own rebound.

“You two on this team?”

Manny nods.

“Then get your ass over here right now.”

Brooks takes another layup.

“Right now, got-dammit!”

Brooks lets the ball slide off his fingers and bounce aimlessly toward the other end of the gym floor. Intimidated if not entirely chastened, he braces himself with his standard smirk, then follows Manny onto the bleachers.

“My teams play a running game. We outrun everyone …”

As he talks, the squad remains silent.

“… I was playing junior college and my knee went …”

Still silent.

“… right now, I want to do this to put something back into the community …”

Not a word.

“… and what I want from you is for you to listen when I tell you something and give me your best game. You do that and we’re going to win games.”

He talks for forty minutes straight, with the entire crew sitting quietly on the bleachers before him. He’s full of all the usual coaching clichés—hard work, discipline, team—but they sit and listen nonetheless. He tells them about his days of college ball, about a career that almost came to be, about covering Patrick Ewing once in a tournament.

“What happened?” asks Tae, breaking the silence.

“With what?”

“When you went up against Ewing?”

Pumpkin shrugs. “He got a bucket or two. But he didn’t embarrass me or nuthin’. It wasn’t like I got embarrassed.”

The boys look at each other, as if to ask whether to extend more than token credibility. If Pumpkin claimed to have powered past Patrick Ewing, they might be skeptical; saying he merely stayed up with the man gave the account a hint of possibility. Pumpkin must have been big enough for college ball; he’s six-five, two-twenty, and he still has the hard build of a power forward. If he says he once played with Ewing, maybe he really did.

“… but I don’t want you if you ain’t gonna listen. I’m not talkin’ to hear my ownself talk. If I’m sayin’ somethin’, then it’s because you need to hear it …”

On this first day, at least, they give him more consideration than they’ve allotted any previous coach. Pumpkin had come to Ella a week ago, fresh from a court date up at Wabash. He used to hang at Fayette and Monroe; the boys who were working the corners at the top of the hill knew Pumpkin well enough. Now he was on a court-ordered probation and looking to fulfill his community service requirement with something a little more tolerable than sweeping a street somewhere.

“All right then,” he says in conclusion. “Let’s start with ten laps around the court.”

The grumbling starts. The boys look at each other. DeAndre offers a brief, profane comment.

“Ten laps,” Pumpkin says. “Now.”

“We usually just run a game,” says Manny.

“Ten laps now. Last man runs twenty.”

“Aw shit.”

Tae and Dewayne bolt down the court, followed by the rest. All save for DeAndre, who can’t bring himself to do anything but test the man’s authority. He half-walks, half-jogs, letting himself be lapped by the others. Then he begins running—backward. He’s lapped again.

“DeAndre.”

Pumpkin is glowering.

“Run ’em right. You got twenty laps and if you don’t want to run ’em right, you can take your ass home.”

The others suppress laughter. DeAndre, too, breaks into a smile, turns around, and begins sprinting to catch up. He runs ten, tries to sneak off, and is caught by Pumpkin, who orders him back for ten more.

“Now,” says the coach, “line up on this side.”

Windsprints. Followed by weave drills. Followed by fast-break drills. Followed by foul shooting. On this Tuesday afternoon in September, practice has actually become practice.

Lord knows they’re now ready for a little discipline, having played in the summer Cloverdale League under the M. L. K. Rec Center banner and lost every single game. From the Perkins Homes to Bentalou to Cherry Hill, squads from around the city took turns on Ella’s fledglings, running them up and down the asphalt of Cloverdale Park. True, all the other teams had one or two ringers—some of them as old as seventeen or eighteen—playing behind the birth certificates of younger boys. But the Martin Luther Kings weren’t precise about the age requirement either. Twin was seventeen, Truck was eighteen, and everyone else save for R.C., Brooks, and Manny Man, was past their sixteenth birthday.

It had been ugly and discouraging, and DeAndre gave up first, stalking off the court at the end of the first night’s debacle, unwilling to return if it meant paying the fifty cents in league fines levied against him.

“Shit,” he had shouted in the early minutes of the game, losing a rebound.

“Quarter fine on number six,” declared the scorer, invoking the Cloverdale rule that put a cost of twenty-five cents per utterance on profanity.

“Number six, come here.”

DeAndre crossed the court to the scorer’s table.

“You owe a quarter for cursing,” the league director explained.

“Ain’t got it,” DeAndre shrugged.

“You got to pay before the next game or you don’t play.”

“Man, fuck that.”

“Fifty cents.”

As far as Cloverdale was concerned, that was it for DeAndre. The rest of the team paid their fines and kept coming back for more, losing all summer long to teams from Flag House, Northeast, and lower Park Heights. They lost by thirty, by fifteen, by eighteen. Once, in a spasm of well-played basketball, they pulled even with a team that had pummeled them in an earlier tourney at the Flag project rec center. R.C. stole an inbound pass and they were up by two.

“Time out,” yelled the opposing coach. “Call the time out.”

The Flag House team regrouped. The Martin Luther Kings high-fived each other and went for Dixie cups of ice water. By the end of the quarter they were once again down by a dozen.

R.C. couldn’t bear it. He played every game as if the past had no bearing on him, as if today, he would lace up, stretch his legs, and play the game of basketball that he was meant to play. Often, there would be glimpses of great ability—a steal, a perfect pass, a left-handed reverse beneath the bucket—but eventually the common denominator dragged at everyone’s individual moments. The Hilltop boys weren’t salvation enough, though Mike, Truck, and Twin played hard. Nor could R.C. get the collective engine up and running for more than a few minutes at time. The team still played run-and-gun: Tae, with graceful, no-look passes that simply sailed off the court; Dewayne, trying to dribble past both opposing guards, falling to his knees, still trying to handle the ball rather than pass; Brooks, heaving his prayerful off-balance jumper toward those unforgiving Cloverdale rims and getting only an angry, metallic brick-bounce for his trouble. R. C. fumed and cursed and paid the fines as two losses became four, then six and eight. Yet he never managed to let go of the idea that the next contest, or the next one after, would bring this rec center squad that first, elusive victory.

“They ain’t better than us,” he told Tae, walking home after another loss. “They just playin’ more together.”

They finished the summer league with a perfect 0–10 record. For the Cloverdale all-star game, Twin and Tae were chosen to represent M.L.K. Dewayne was livid; R.C. took it as an insult, too, but he carried it well. “I know my game is right,” he told people.

The Cloverdale experience ended up souring some of the original team members. Manny Man, Dinky, and Brooks were drifting from the squad by the tourney’s end, dismayed at losing playing time to the Hilltop boys; DeAndre, too, chose to miss most of the tourney over fifty cents and the insult to his First Amendment rights. But R. C. emerged from the summer of defeat by asking Ella about the team’s chances for a winter league. Ella, though, had something even better: She had Pumpkin.

He had arrived in the wake of Cloverdale, talking about having learned a lesson and wanting to put something back into the neighborhood after months of slinging and using. He had a part-time job at the bar up on Penrose, but other than that he was available. Besides, he’d done this before, he assured her. Though Ella had seen Pumpkin up on Monroe Street, she was more than pleased. From her point of view, time on the corner did not automatically disqualify a candidate; if it did, two of every three males between eighteen and twenty-four would then be disqualified. She had a coach, and when Pumpkin brought his friend Timothy to practice, she had an assistant coach as well.

“You gonna run for me like you ain’t run before,” he tells them in that first, hard practice.

Only in the last forty-five minutes do they break it down and run a game. But here again, Pumpkin stops the action to lecture and demonstrate and, on occasion, berate players for courtside sins. He is loud—at times sympathetic in his approach, at times angry—but always loud. He is, on this first day, a center to a team for which the center could never hold.

When Manny Man telegraphs a pass and blows a three-on-one break, R.C. begins his usual rant only to find six-and-a-half feet of Mt. Pumpkin looming over him, telling him to shut up and play.

“You don’t yell at him. You don’t need to yell at him.”

“But he ain’t …”

“R.C., shut the hell up and play the game. You do your job, I’ll do my job.”

Two days later, at the second practice, Pumpkin and Timothy are late to the gym. The boys, accustomed to broken promises from the grown men and women of this neighborhood, resort to the usual sarcasm.

“Where Pumpkin at?” asks Dinky, arriving late himself.

“Up on the corner coppin’,” says DeAndre.

They shoot around, run a game of fifty, then start to choose sides for a pickup contest. Finally, Pumpkin posts, storming through the door
with something less than an apology and an immediate demand that they line up for windsprints.

“Tae, stop messin’ and run ’em right.”

For now, it doesn’t much matter to them that their coach was, in fact, up on the corner. It doesn’t matter that there are days when Pumpkin and Timothy both seem a little more wired and wild-eyed than usual. If they’re slinging, so be it. If they ‘re getting high, that’s their business. Even more than Ella, the boys of Fayette Street have no interest in making judgments about anything save for the basketball itself. Everyone slings. Everyone gets high. And at this point, if Fat Curt himself came into the gym, shouted them into submission, then showed them how to win a basketball game, they’d probably run for Curt.

“Look up … Look up … Brooks, you got to look down court. You had a man breakin’ …”

By fits and starts, they fall into line, grumbling at the occasional insults and humiliations but also comforted by the belief that they are now part of something a little more real. After a couple of weeks, Pumpkin brings in two ringers from one of his earlier teams—Tank and Tony—both of whom are between seventeen and eighteen years old and are full-time slinging down on McHenry Street. And the extra year or two matters: Not only do Tank and Tony bring better skills to the Francis Woods gym, they bring the calm certainty of corner veterans. They’ve been out there long enough to be hardened off, to accept the truth about where they’re going and what they’re going to get. All around them is the huff-and-puff pretense of the manchild, of adolescents still holding back a bit, caught in the no-man’s land between commitment and fantasy. But Tony and Tank have both been there; the bluster isn’t necessary or even remotely useful. When they go down to the corner, they go to sling, not play; when they come into the gym to run a game, they run the best game they’ve got. They carry themselves in absolute proportion to the event, coming at it directly, with no quarter asked for or received. Bad calls or jail time, bad passes or short counts—they deal with all of it by corner rules; if the affront is big enough, someone gets hurt, and anything less won’t get cried over. Tank and Tony speak volumes to the younger players without saying so much as a word. Their presence in the gym makes everyone else choose between growing up or getting out. Suddenly the rec center team—though no longer a strictly a sixteen-and-under affair—is fast and lethal.

Of the original members, only Tae, Dewayne, and R.C. have the skill
to play at the higher level; add the three from Hilltop and the future begins to look ominous for the likes of Manny Man, Dinky, and Brooks.

“It ain’t our team no longer,” says Dinky bitterly, leaving after the last practice he bothers attending. He came to the gym for the joy of it, for nothing more or less than physical release. Though his game wasn’t as sharp as others’, he knew where to find his points and rebounds in a slower, more casual version of run-and-gun. Now, for the purpose of winning, Dinky is expendable.

As Dinky goes, so goes his cousin, though DeAndre has pride enough not to be shunted aside without the proper flourish. Shortly after Tank and Tony are brought down to the gym, DeAndre finds a few obvious ways to violate the new standards of practice, and then, when Pumpkin finally explodes, he fires back.

“You ain’t shit,” DeAndre tells him. “I’m tired of your bullshit.”

“Leave then,” Pumpkin tells him.

DeAndre does, slamming the double doors behind him. What began as an afternoon distraction last winter—a three-day-a-week digression back to fading childhood—had become some kind of job, replete with demands and standards and bosses. DeAndre wants no part of it. Neither does Dinky or Brooks—both of whom join the boycott. With Boo kicked off the team by Ella for fighting, and Brian locked up in juvenile detention behind a drug raid on his mother’s house, what’s left of the original lineup can be counted on three fingers.