The Corner (81 page)

“Eric get hit?” asks R.C.

Dinky shrugs. “Ain’t nobody come through here.”

Who started the shooting? Half a dozen of them want to know the answer to that question.

“Them D.C. niggers,” says Boo.

But when pressed, Boo admits to seeing little.

They move down McHenry, some in the street, others fanning out into the back alleys. Behind the rowhouses on the south side of the street, R.C. is halfway to Stricker when he sees someone race past in the connecting cross-alley. He fires off his .25 and it starts again, but this time with the confusion running the other way, down the hill toward Carey.

“They runnin’!” shouts Boo.

From Calhoun Street comes a long string of shots and more shouts—then quiet. Slowly, by twos and threes, the boys drift back to Gilmor, retreating to their original positions and no farther. When the police finally roll through, they’ve stashed their guns on top of the tires of parked cars and behind rowhouse stoops. Some duck into the carryout, others walk across Pratt to the alley basketball court on Lemmon Street, where after-action reports are delivered.

“Motherfuckers ran and shit,” says R.C.

Eric is grazed in the calf. No one else seems to be hit.

“I think I hit one of them niggers in the alley,” says R.C. “He didn’t stop though.”

“Bullets all around me,” says Boo, elated. “I’m runnin’ up Stricker and they just missin’ me.”

Beyond that, no one has much of a clue. How many? From what direction? Who shot first? Who was where? Was there even a D.C. boy
within half a mile of McHenry Street? It doesn’t make any difference now that the battle is over. What matters is that on this night some crew tried to press them, but they stayed put and kept a corner; all else is mere commentary.

“They might gonna come back,” says Manny Man.

“Then we be right here,” says Tae.

They smoke weed and talk up their heroics until long into the night, secure in the company of each other and enjoying tales of the battlefield that grow bolder by the minute.

It’s after three when R.C. finally creeps into his mother’s apartment, blunted and drunk from celebrating. The next day, he doesn’t open his eyes until nearly noon. He gets up off his mattress to kill the sound on an X-Men cartoon, then pads out from his bedroom in T-shirt, boxers, and sweat socks. He goes to the kitchen phone, punches the digits for Tae’s beeper, hangs up, then wanders over to the living room, slumping down on the sofa.

The apartment is empty. His mother is hard at work at the dry cleaner; his brother Bug is now overseas on a ship; Darlene, his sister, is out running the streets somewhere. Without anything or anyone else to occupy his mind, R.C.’ s thoughts run beyond his afternoon hangover.

He’ll have to go back. Today and tomorrow and the next day, if he’s really a gangster beyond pretending. He’ll have to be down at Gilmor and McHenry every day, or almost every day, if he’s going to do this thing for more than pocket money.

Yet R.C. has no strength in him this morning, no reservoir of confidence that he can draw from. Last night he was scared. Real scared. Here, alone, he admits this to himself. Who the fuck wouldn’t be scared with people shooting at you. When the guns started going off, he was half-relieved to be past the waiting, to be dealing with it at last. Afterward, with all of his boys around laughing and bragging—then, too, he felt some elation. But now, by light of day, he can’t manufacture any emotion beyond a vague, queasy terror.

He could have died. Any one of them could be dead now.

The worst part is the sense that nothing else remains for him, that all of life’s other doors have been slammed and sealed. It isn’t just last night or tonight. The corner now looms as a workaday world, and he knows in his heart it will wear him down to nothing.

He doesn’t have Dinky’s soldier’s heart; none of them do, really. He
can’t be as clever and subtle as Tae, nor can he muster the blind obedience of Boo or Brooks. He isn’t good with the money like some of them are. He’s not like DeAndre; he can’t really lead others or intimidate.

And then there’s the lure of the vials. In the last few months, R.C. has messed with that shit now and again; he knows he has enough of a taste for it that if he stays out on the corner, he’ll be finding new ways to come up short on the count. He can’t fool himself like Boo does; Boo is smoking up product all night long and then lying about it, swearing he isn’t puffing anything beyond blunts. R.C. might lie to everyone else, too—everyone lies about it in the beginning—but now, conjuring the future, he’s willing to admit to himself that it’s a real problem. Being around the vials will bring him down quick.

He is not, he has to concede, very good at the corner. Yet the corner is all he has left. School has always been little more than a bad joke, and now that he’s turned sixteen, any effort to return to the rolls of Francis M. Woods would be an act of absurd volunteerism. R.C. can’t imagine what he might say to Rose Davis to convince her of his commitment, nor does he particularly want her convinced. His earlier promises had generally been made under duress, usually when Miss Davis caught him sliding into the gym for rec center basketball practice on days when he had missed every class.

Now there isn’t even a point to basketball practice. For one thing, Pumpkin had half emptied the gym when he decided to charge his players a dollar each to attend every practice session. For another, R.C. had tired of the rec center team at the very moment the star-crossed squad managed to do the unthinkable.

They won a game.

It was not just a contest against some neighborhood pickup team, either. With Miss Ella’s support, they had entered the mayor’s invitational tournament, an annual event that brought out the best rec center and community teams in the city. The Martin Luther Kings, unheard of and unheralded, arrived on a November night in the vast expanse of the Lake Clifton High School gymnasium, sized up the competition, and went to work.

They were an altogether different unit than in the Cloverdale summer league; still inconsistent, to be sure, but now capable of more than momentary flashes of brilliance. Now, with Tank, Tony, Truck, Twin, and Mike as the starting five—and R.C. and Tae as sixth and seventh men off the bench—they were big enough not to be overpowered, deep
enough not to tire, and fast enough to run with any rec team in the city.

Months of playing together in the Francis Woods gym had given the squad confidence, as well as an instinctive feel for each other. There was still no strategy to their game; it was playground ball with better uniforms. But now, when R.C. came down with a defensive rebound, he fairly knew where Tony would be at midcourt, waiting for the outlet. Now, when Tank put his head down and drove the lane, Mike could drift to the baseline behind him and know that if the shot wasn’t there, Tank would kick the rock back out for Mike’s soft jumper. When the Kings were bad, they were still godawful. But when they were good, their game was right.

The first round showed the tournament that much, when the Kings beat a Pimlico squad by eighteen. By contrast, the quarterfinal contest against John Eager Howard began with a sudden loss of confidence. The Howard squad had tortured them twice during Cloverdale, and the rec team, intimidated, was down by eight—ten to two—early in the first quarter when Pumpkin stopped screaming long enough to sub R.C. for Truck.

With a rebound, an interception, another rebound, and a quick, half-court outlet pass, R.C. managed to stabilize the team, providing the hard in-the-paint work that made the running game possible. Soon the score was tied, and at the half, the Kings were up by six—a circumstance that led to the kind of bitter recrimination from their opponents that had for almost a year been the lament of the M.L.K. crew.

“That one there run with my brother,” one of the Howard forwards wailed, “and he nineteen.”

“All them players is wrong. They all too old.”

Pumpkin huddled them together, ranted at botched plays and missed opportunities for a few minutes, railed at them for ignoring his commands from the bench, then concluded with a declaration that seemed to surprise everyone; “You all got a chance to win this.”

But the starting five began the second half cold, and before long, Pumpkin was sputtering and shouting at the edge of the court. When R.C. came in for Twin with most of the third quarter gone, they were down by three and playing tame.

Again he stepped in and raised their game, centering the defense, covering the paint. At three minutes into the last quarter, they were up by six and Pumpkin was shouting at Mike to slow their game, to force
the Howard players to work for their shots. Instead, the Kings ran. It’s what they do best.

Ignoring their coach, they were soon up by eleven with five minutes left. But Pumpkin was livid. He turned his fury on the referees, badgering them about a traveling call.

“I’m asking what kind of shit is that?”

Technical. The M.L.K. players were glaring at their bench.

“What the hell you lookin’ at?” Pumpkin shouted.

No one answered. For once, the team was utterly composed. The same R.C. who would scream at other players for imaginary errors was now calm and quiet, responding to Pumpkin’s tantrum with nothing stronger than a sad shake of his head. Ever more furious, Pumpkin turned his attention back to the ref, then to the failings of his players, then to the whole assembly in general: “No one listens to a fuckin’ thing I say.”

“Shut up,” shouted Tony, running past the bench on offense.

“What? What did you say to me?”

Tony said nothing more, but Pumpkin turned and kicked the wooden bleacher. The ref eyed him warily. On the next exchange. Tony was backing past his coach while defending a Howard guard, glancing toward the bleachers.

“Just let us play,” he told Pumpkin.

“Say what?”

“Just let us play the damn game.”

So Pumpkin sat, pouting, as R.C. stole an offensive rebound to which he had no right, then powered up for two points and a foul. When he converted the third point, the game was iced. Even with a late Howard surge, the Kings won by seven.

At the buzzer, the M.L.K. players all banded together on the court in self-congratulation, a safe distance from their coach. In victory, Pumpkin looked defeated, and on the ride home to West Baltimore, it was R.C. who took in the attaboys from Tank and Mike and Tony, players who knew and were willing to acknowledge just what he had brought to this game.

“Good game,” Mike told him.

“Yeah, R.C., you played hard.”

It was his game, his moment. Thirty minutes of quiet validation for the one thing at which he genuinely excelled. He knew it, too, but celebrating the victory at the Franklin Street McDonald’s that night, and later walking home with Tae, R.C. was strangely subdued. There was no boasting, no
wild claims of greatness. R.C. seemed utterly unlike himself: content, sated, as if a long and brutal fever had finally broken.

The magic didn’t last, of course. In the semifinals the following night, the rec team lost its poise at the very end. Down only two with the final seconds racing off the clock, Tony deflected an opponent’s pass and Tae came up with the steal and a clear lane to the basket. It looked too good to be true, and it was. Tae sped bandy-legged toward the undefended hoop, alone and in full possession of what seemed a sure game-tying layup. Instead, and for no apparent reason, Tae slammed the ball down into the paint at the last minute and sped beneath the basket. Behind him, the ball hovered in the lane for an instant—waiting, presumably, for a trailing M.L.K. player and a heart-stopping dunk. Except that no such player was in the vicinity. The ball bounced again and was retrieved by the opposing team.

After the buzzer, Tae made no effort to explain. His logic, if not exactly appreciated, was understood. Tying or even winning the game wasn’t enough; style itself was the issue, and style demanded the no-look, Lawd-have-mercy slam dunk.

R.C. barely reacted to the loss. He gathered up his sweats and his winter coat and sat silently in the car on the way back across town. After playing the game of his life the night before, he had managed to distance himself from the contest, the team, and everything else that had pre occupied him for the last year. He had proven something to himself and to everyone he knew. With that done, he was left with nothing but another empty feeling.

Basketball, he now knew, could not for a moment save him, or change him, or provide any future other than the one he dreaded. On one level, he had always known this: The rec center wasn’t some junior college team. It wasn’t a city high school varsity, or even one of the standout rec center programs like Bentalou. This year had always been about nothing more than his love of the game itself.

And yet, in the long months of losing, R.C. had managed at times to lose track of himself, to begin to believe there was something at stake inside the Francis Woods gymnasium. There, in the steamy heat, he had played his heart out, devoting himself to one small, self-contained quadrant of his existence while everything else in his life crumbled.

On the court, he was central to his crew, essential even. But now, in the quiet of his mother’s apartment, he thinks back on last night’s mayhem and is oppressed by the terrible realization that despite all the
heroics, the corner game offers him no group or club or crew by which he can take any measure of himself. R.C. has lived his whole life for this choice. He has watched his father, his older brothers, and his sister go down to the corners before him. Like every other member of C.M.B., he has for years spouted the hard-as-nails cant of the gangster-in-training. And with McHenry and Gilmor at stake, he was down there last night with the rest of them, willing to risk his life, ready to catch a bullet for the sake of saying that he is a part of something, that he is and always will be a Crenshaw Mafia Brother.

That was how he had felt last night. If there were doubts early on, they were matched by the elation he felt when the D.C. boys broke and ran. But with his mother gone to work and the cartoons turned down, R.C. has to think about the night to come, the night after, and all the nights from now on.