The Corner (69 page)

“Who the hell you think you foolin’?” Fran asks, walking away. “You think I’m going to believe you ain’t hustling when you out all night long?”

DeAndre ignores her, staying out the next night and the night after. Fran locks the door and her son spends the next night on Scoogie’s couch. When he shows up again the following afternoon, Fran shouts him down, assuring her son that he will not stay on Boyd Street unless he’s working a straight job or attending school.

“I am in school,” he protests.

“Andre, you ain’t even doing what little work they sending you. I swear, you must think I’m stupid.”

DeAndre pouts.

“You either get your shit together or you get out. You want to hustle in the street, you can live in the street then.”

Fran leaves the house, slamming the door behind her. When she returns an hour later, she’s even angrier than when she left. She’s off drugs. She’s in school. She’s trying. For once in her life, she has the high ground with her oldest son, and she intends to keep it.

“You pack up your shit yet?” she yells from just inside the front door. DeAndre sits at the kitchen table, his back to her, smoking a Newport.

“You hear me?”

He says nothing.

“Boy,” she yells, “I said do you hear me?”

She stalks into the kitchen, ready to slap the back of her son’s head, ready to throw his ass out onto Boyd Street.

“Boy …”

Through the curl of cigarette smoke, Fran looks down and sees a short-answer quiz on American government. DeAndre is halfway through and still writing. And just beneath the quiz is a vocabulary assignment, neatly completed.

At the sight, Fran grows more furious than ever.

“Boy,” she shouts. “Don’t you play me like that!”

DeAndre looks up, the picture of academic earnestness. “What?” he asks her. “What now?”

Fran can’t think of what else to say. She storms upstairs, slamming her bedroom door. DeAndre waits a few moments more, making sure his mother isn’t planning another angry sortie down the stairs. Then he collects the school papers—finished and unfinished—and slides them into his social studies text. He steps into the living room, slips the book beneath the small pressed-wood stereo table, and grabs his coat. He heads out into the street.

Ella Thompson is outside on the rec center blacktop, laying claim to her playground on a chilly October afternoon. The youngest children are clustered around the center steps, using lined notebook sheaves to make paper airplanes. The girls are at the sliding board or on the four-square court, arguing about whether New Jersey is a city or a country, and, if it’s not a city, whether Tosha has to go back to square one. The boys use the long end of the blacktop to play touch football. Disadvantaged in so many ways, Little Stevie, Daymo, T.J., and the others are at a further loss for having grown up Coltless. The Baltimore NFL franchise fled town in 1984; T.J. wears a Washington Redskins sweatshirt, and Daymo, when he catches a long pass, declares himself to be the 49er’s Jerry Rice in the end zone.

Ella watches their game with one eye and monitors the girl’s foursquare argument with the other. With her third eye, she sees Old Man nine years old and already a corner prodigy, using a disposable lighter to authenticate a crash-and-burn stunt for a younger boy’s paper plane.

“Old Man,” she shouts. “What are you doing?”

The boy looks up blandly.

“Give me that lighter.”

“What lighter?”

Ella stares him down. Old Man goes into his pockets and gives up the contraband. A year or three more and he’ll know to hug the wall and make the knockers search his pockets. No sense giving it up if you’re going to take the charge either way.

“You know better than that,” Ella tells him.

Old Man shrugs and hitches up his denims, looking for fresh entertainment. Across the blacktop the football game is at an impasse.

“Third down,” shouts Little Stevie.

“Fourth,” says Daymo.

“This fourth down now,” Stevie insists.

“You ran it once and threw twice, yo,” argues Chubb.

Little Stevie calculates.

“Bitch, you cheatin’,” Daymo says.

Now, according to the industry standard, Stevie has to get in Daymo’s face and mug for him. The two are standing eye-to-eye on the blacktop, leaning into each other, grimacing. Ella watches for signs of genuine hostility, but can see only the usual bluster. She lets it go.

“Steal ’em, Stevie,” says T.J.

Their faces are inches apart. Finally, Stevie starts to laugh, shoving
the challenge away. Daymo takes a quick, open-handed swipe at his friend’s head and misses.

“Fourth down,” he insists.

“Yo, this fourth,” says T.J., assuring his teammate.

“Fourth then,” says Stevie, now indifferent. He hikes the ball to himself, backpedals, and overthrows a wobbly pass to Tremaine at the corner of the asphalt. The boy barely gets one hand on the ball.

“Boy,” shouts T.J. “I was open!”

Another argument ensues; the game dissolves in rancor. Bored by the argument, Daymo wanders over to the fence, gripping it with both hands, pressing his face to the cool metal.

“Yo,” he says, “check it out.”

Across the vacant lot, a battered gray Buick is parked on the close side of Mount Street. Two men are sitting in the front seat. Not talking. Not moving. Just sitting.

“They been there like all morning,” says Stevie.

“Stickup boys,” pronounces Daymo. He’s ten; he surely knows a stickup crew when he sees one.

“Must be,” agrees Stevie, a year older. “Five-oh don’t drive no off-brand car like that.”

“They steady watching that boy Mike’s house,” says T. J., naming one of the younger Mount Street slingers. “They see Mike comin’ up the block and look out—there be drama then.”

Ella’s kids gather at the fence, third-and fourth-and fifth-graders watching for God knows what to happen. The two men in the car do seem to be waiting on something at the rowhouse across the street. Some of the boys from Baltimore and Gilmor have been going in and out of the place for weeks now.

“They gonna hit that stash,” says Daymo.

The boys watch for a while longer, with Little Stevie creeping down the alley walk to get a better look through the windshield. He comes back to affirm the rumor.

“They stone stickup boys.”

Slowly, the talk ripples across the playground, from the older boys to the younger ones, then to the girls gathered around the far edge of the blacktop. Soon eight-year-olds are whispering to seven-year-olds about the parked Buick.

Of course, the playground tales get more elaborate as the afternoon wears itself out. The men in the car are not just a local stickup crew;
they’re New York Boys come all the way down here to Fayette and Mount to settle a debt. Or maybe some of the gang from Lexington Terrace, coming up the hill from the projects to avenge some insult.

“What if they start shooting right now?” asks Clarice, biting her thumbnail. “I mean, what if they was shooting at us?”

Stevie loses patience. “Why they gonna shoot at us?”

“I’m sayin’ like they start shooting and the bullets be comin’ this way at us.”

“Man,” says Daymo, “my ass would be on the ground.”

“My ass would be ’round the block,” counters Stevie.

“My ass would be in China somewheres,” says Tremaine, finishing it off. The girl laughs.

T.J. narrows his eyes to slits as he folds his arms across his chest. Gangsta chill. “Yo, I’d have to shoot back.”

“Man, please,” says Daymo, disbelieving.

“Man, you think I won’t when I will. I go home and get my nine out and light them boys up.”

Clarice giggles and T.J. tries to slap at her. She ducks and runs back toward Ella, who is sitting on the rec steps, patiently explaining to one of the younger children why there are rules against taking the board games outside.

“… if you take the games outside and lose the pieces, then we won’t have them to play with.”

“But I won’t lose the pieces.”

“Tyree, please. It’s a rule.”

Tyree sulks and Clarice uses the pause to blurt out the news. “Miss Ella,” she says. “Those men in the car is stickup boys. They gonna start shooting.”

Ella looks over at the Buick and shakes her head.

“Clarice, you do not know that.”

“Daymo says …”

“Daymo does not know that either.”

The girl drifts off, leaving Ella to stare at the Buick for a few moments more. She has been at the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center for three years now, long enough to recall a half-dozen horrible moments when she was running across this same patch of asphalt amid the crackle of gunfire, trying to herd her charges back into the cinder-block building. At any moment, the gunplay can happen. But if every rumor is given credence, no children would ever be playing anywhere near Fayette Street.

The men in the Buick are waiting for something, she tells herself, but that could mean a dozen different things. She keeps the children outside.

Now that the mayhem of the daylong summer camp sessions is finished, now that the hot months have given way to fall, Ella is regaining some piece of mind. The early darkness and cooler weather seem to slow the neighborhood just a bit or, at least, to make the corner world seem less intrusive. It has made it possible for her to see things from a new perspective.

A lot of that, she knows, has to do with Kiti. Three weeks earlier, in late September, her youngest left Baltimore for California. She didn’t know much about where he was headed, but what she knew sounded good to her: Kiti would be in Long Beach, which she saw as a picture postcard of palm trees and water, and he would be in the care of his older brother, Tito. Whatever Long Beach was or wasn’t, she could not imagine that it was home to the kind of struggle found on her doorstep. In some mythical place called California, Kiti Perry—her child of solitude, her quiet dreamer who had passed through adolesence holding himself in check—would surely find room to breathe deep and live.

The original plan had been for her son to take his best friend with him, but Preston had neither the money nor the will to make the jump. For Ella, at least, it was just as well. There was something about Preston that she found discomfiting, something that smelled a little too much like the corner. She had seen enough of Preston in the days before Kiti left to sense some sway that the boy had over her son. Ella knew Preston was on the corners with Shamrock and Kwame; she had worried for him and prayed for him. In the last few weeks Preston had come up out of the game, hanging with Kiti, clinging to his old schoolyard friend as if to a touchstone to ward off the inevitable temptation, but Ella had her doubts.

For most of the summer, the two young men had plotted their joint escape to California. Preston would go back to school for his general equivalency diploma, get a part-time job, save enough to get on the plane with Kiti. When none of that happened, the plan was amended so that Kiti would go out there first, get a job, get settled, and then come back to visit his mother during the Christmas holidays. By New Year’s, Preston would have enough cash to go with him.

That was still the plan. Yet Ella was skeptical. For one thing, Kiti had called the week before to say that he wouldn’t be coming back for the holidays; Tito had gotten him a job with the telephone company, and
at this point, he didn’t have time enough to be taking vacation. For another thing, Preston was looking rough. She’d seen him yesterday with DeAndre and Kwame at the bottom end of Vine Street—the three of them sharing two forty-ounce malt liquors and looking over the Fulton Avenue corners as if they had some stake in the action. Since Kiti had left, Preston had stopped coming around to see Ella, and when they passed in the street, he seemed bleary-eyed and impatient, offering very little in the way of real conversation.

She’d known about the drinking, of course. Before he left, Kiti had been sharing forties with his friend more nights than not, the two of them together on the stoop or on the small garden wall at the corner house on Fulton. She knew about the weed, too. Two weeks before Kiti took off, he and Preston and Jamie had gone down to Harbor Park for a late movie only to find themselves in the Central District lockup by night’s end.

The way Ella heard the story, the boys had been sitting on a curbside outside the theater, drinking beer from paper bags, when Preston took out a half-smoked blunt and lit up. Minutes later, on the way into the theater, the three of them were jacked up against the wall by a uniformed officer. More police arrived and one of them searched Preston, finding the blunt. He looked at the small bit of weed, then over at Kiti, then toward the other police, who didn’t seem to pay him any mind. Then the cop dropped the weed back into Preston’s pocket—a charitable act and, perhaps, an acknowledgment that a half-smoked blunt meant precious little to anyone in Baltimore’s drug war. But the cop who had originally pulled them up was less casual; he searched all three of them carefully, rediscovered the contraband for which they had already received absolution, then charged Preston with simple drug possession. Jamie and Kiti took open-container charges for the beer.

By West Baltimore standards, it all seemed innocent enough to Ella, and Kiti was able to win an indefinite postponement of the case before his trip to California. But Ella still couldn’t help being a little concerned. Kiti had never been in any kind of trouble before, and though the downtown arrest meant next to nothing once it washed up as a district court misdemeanor, it gave Ella a vague sense that Preston, for all his talk about starting anew, was still trouble. When she saw the boy hanging down on Fulton, she felt even more relieved at Kiti’s escape.

Mostly, she credited God with her son’s deliverance, just as she gave praise to Him for Kiti’s older brother and sisters. All of her children—
save for Pooh, of course—had graduated from high school. All had respect for people and for themselves. All knew how to work hard and hold down a job. But Kiti’s escape—coming as it did in the years since Fayette Street had collapsed into a string of drug markets—marked for Ella the end of a long, dangerous arc. Even more than the rec center, Ella’s own children were the essential victories to be claimed.