“That wasn’t nuthin’,” he tells her.
“That’s what you say now,” Fran snaps back. “But you was a scared little boy in front of that judge.”
“I was,” DeAndre admits, laughing. “He made me nervous. I ain’t about to come back in his court.”
In the weeks afterward, DeAndre seems to hold to that thought. His attendance at school becomes a little more sporadic now that his probation officer isn’t counting, but he’s staying off the corner. Fran can tell because he keeps crying the blues about his damn Easter outfit. Without cash money, he’s leaning hard on Fran, and in a strange way, that gives her some pride.
It’s the old DeAndre talking, she tells herself. My child, my son. And while she can always go boosting in the malls to get him some Easter clothes, she understands that to keep things right with DeAndre she’ll need more than that. If she could detox, she would be there for him, although the thought itself is intimidating. Fran hasn’t been clean and sober for a good fifteen years and now, she’s got nothing to speak of—just some old furniture piled up in the basement of the Dew Drop and $180 a month on check day. She’s got a medical assistance card, which grants no coverage for drug detox, so that means a long wait for a government-money rehab bed. She’s got some boosting charges coming up in the city and two counties, any one of which might land her in jail. And she has that second-floor bedroom, where nothing that she ever acquires or accumulates will be safe from anyone else. That much is evident two days after DeAndre comes home from court, when Fran makes the mistake of buying more than a day’s portion of tuna fish, bread, and mayo at the Korean grocery. She uses about half to make sandwiches for DeRodd and DeAndre, then puts the rest in the refrigerator for the next day. But there are no next days on Fayette Street. By morning, every last crumb is gone.
This, she tells herself, is no way to live. Even heroin no longer suffices to obscure the daily insult that her life has become. Day after day, she talks to herself about changing, and then, at the very thought of what such a thing would require, she talks herself right back onto the corner.
On the first day of April, she’s out on the stoop, same as she ever was, watching the check-day traffic at Mount and Fayette. After a time, Mike Ellerbee cruises up. This is the same Little Mike who was a regular gangster on these corners, slinging coke and shooting people when needed. Little Mike, who shot Joe Laney in the back that one time, who would’ve killed Joe if he hadn’t run out of bullets, who shot that other stickup boy not even a year back, and, by Fran’s reckoning, should still be locked up behind that charge.
“Hey, Fran.”
“How you?”
“I’m goin’ to sea.”
Fran looks at him as if he’d declared himself an astronaut. Mike has supervised probation and ten years suspended hanging over him from the last shooting; he’s not going anywhere.
“You goin’ where?”
“I’m gonna get on a ship. Soon as I get my Z-card.”
“Huh?”
“My Z-card and a physical. I get that from the Coast Guard and I’ll be gone. Ricky and Bug helped me get in the union.”
R.C.’ s older stepbrothers, now more off the corners than on, were members of the seafarer’s local. And the first part of Mike’s story, when he tells it, rings true to Fran. He explains that despite his criminal record, Ricky and Bug paid the right people to get him into the union. For Mike, this is a last chance. If he stays on Fayette Street, he’ll surely sling drugs, and he’ll just as surely end up shooting the next fiend who tries to rob him. Mike has too much heart not to shoot. That or he’ll take a drug charge; either way, he’ll go back to Judge Johnson at Circuit Court to get banged with the whole ten years.
As to the rest of story, though, Fran is skeptical.
“You gonna be able to get on a ship when you on probation?”
“I’m gonna talk with the judge.”
Fran nods, not buying it. No way, she thinks. No one here gets out alive.
“So you gonna be a sailor?”
Mike smiles broadly.
“You ever been on a ship before?”
“No. But they gonna teach me.”
“Hmm.”
Later that same day, she’s down in the basement of the Dew Drop, her face hovering over lines on a mirror. But this time it isn’t Bunchie down there with her, it’s Gary, who has brought some vials for old time’s sake.
“You know Mike?” she says abruptly.
Gary nods.
“He gonna go to sea.”
“Who?”
“Little Mike. Mike Ellerbee. He goin’ to sail the seas.”
She smirks as she says it, wanting not to believe. But Gary is rubbing his chin, accepting it on its face the way Gary does everything. It’s another one of the things she hates about Gary—his way of taking everything from the Koran to the Wall Street Journal as absolute gospel.
“He say he goin’ to join the union.”
“I thought he was in jail,” says Gary.
“He got probation for shooting that boy.”
“Dag.”
A silence comes over them and for once even Gary has trouble filling it. He looks around the Dew Drop basement at the last relics of their dream home: the glass dining room set, some end tables, two dressers, an old mattress and box spring, even some battered stereo components. Fran watches Gary as he silently calculates the value of each item in Baltimore Street secondhand-store dollars, but she knows it’s an abstract exercise. He can’t steal from her.
“You still got our things.”
“Ain’t too much left,” she says, her eyes following his to the front of the room. Gary says nothing.
“We had it, didn’t we,” she laughs. “We were a team.”
Gary looks at her, his eyes welling as Fran begins scratching at the scab.
“It don’t make sense,” she says, “the way they’re all so glad to see us fall. My whole damn family is glad for it.”
Gary nods, picking up on it. Even before he fell, when he still had most of his money, Gary told her that he was tired of being used by people, tired of them resenting his success even when he was willing to share it with them. If I fell, he had told her then, they’d like me. If I fell, I’d be just like them.
“I thought this is what they wanted,” Gary says, sounding the same note. It’s a pity party for the two of them; Fran usually can’t stand that, but now it’s exactly what she wants to hear.
“It’s like what I do don’t matter,” she says bitterly. “When they needed something, they came to me. I kept the family together, but Scoogie gets the house, the money, everything. It don’t make no sense. It’s like every-body’s glad we’re down.”
“That’s what I’m sayin’.”
“And the thing is, I know we can get back up. You know we got to. Because, I’m sayin’ just look at us, look where we at with this shit.”
“I’m gonna stop,” says Gary, inspired.
“And DeAndre, he’s actually tryin’ now.”
Gary looks surprised, but Fran nods him down. “He’s off the corner and looking for a job. Gary, I’m tellin’ you. He even going to school.”
“Dag.”
“Your son is growin’ up.”
“I know it.”
“If he’s gonna try, then we gotta try.”
Gary is suddenly elated. He’s the fallen angel, stumbling on a new religion. Fran watches as he gets up to walk the basement floor, poking at the stored furnishings of his own dead dreams, talking about how they can both detox together, maybe get a place of their own if Gary can find some kind of work.
“Be a family,” says Gary.
One hopeful speech and Gary is ripe for a renewal of vows. Fran wants nothing of the kind; but still, it’s a kick for her to see Gary so fired up.
“You gonna see,” says Gary. “I’m gonna get right.”
“You gotta find a program,” Fran tells him.
“I can do it myself,” he assures her.
And then, because the dope is there, she does the last line.
SPRING
FOUR
Gary McCullough moves through the back alley in his camouflage gear and jump boots, a commando once again on a quest. He’s a step or two in front of his usual consort, carrying the wheeled dolly, stepping heavily in the alley off Fayette, every other footfall bringing a plastic crackle from the pavement beneath him.
“Gracious,” says Tony Boice.
Gary laughs softly.
“Like a got-damn graveyard,” Tony mutters.
Gary snorts an affirmation. The Addison Street alley got a good cleaning from a city crew just after Christmas, but now, in early April, it’s all junk and trash and stench—a dumping ground like any other ghetto back-street, save for the shimmering layer of empty vials and disposable syringes that seems to cover everything. Addison is sited halfway between two major drug markets, and you can’t walk a couple steps without hearing a half-dozen fallen soldiers crunching underfoot.
“Dag,” says Gary, scanning the ground.
Tony steps out of the mouth of the alley onto Baltimore Street, but Gary is still lost in the glassine backwash. He leans over, both hands on his knees, then reaches down for a solitary vial, a Black Top still harboring a white sediment along the bottom.
“Tallyho.”
He puts the dolly against the wall for a moment, then holds the vial up to sunlight. Half a blast in there, right as rain. He pockets the find, grabs the dolly, then jogs out into the street to catch up with Tony. The two drift toward Fulton.
“Third floor?” asks Gary.
“No, second floor.”
“Mmmm.”
“Stereo, TV, refrigerator, and all that good stuff.”
Ronnie had set it up. Ever since they’d started shooting their dope down with Pops on Fulton Avenue, she’d been marking the walk-up apartment across the street. A working man’s place, or something close to a working man anyway. Ronnie had the tenant leaving his apartment empty and inviting every morning. As for the rest of the three-story rowhouse, she figured it to be mostly vacant.
Ronnie was good at spotting a jackpot, and she was even better when it came to planning the caper. Today, with this Fulton Avenue apartment, Gary expects nothing less from his girl than a smooth operation, especially with Tony Boice as his comrade-in-arms. With Tony, Gary knows what to expect; he can rely on him in ways that he can’t with all the others who run capers with him. Stepping around the corner onto Fulton, Gary actually starts to strut beside his partner, thinking that today, at least, the snake will have no say. Hey, you can forget the walkup. They’re so good, they might just go downtown and knock off the Federal Reserve.
A block from the house, they slip off Fulton and into the back alley behind a mostly vacant stretch of three-story rowhouses. Gary ditches the dolly in an overgrown locust bush. From here on, it’s commando mode, with the hoods pulled up over their heads and their jump boots stepping softly amid the trash and rubble. They roll back out of the alley and their conversation falls to a whisper.
“Which house?”
“Third, no fourth, in.”
They slip inside like they belong. They march right up the steps and pause for just a moment at the apartment door, listening for a sign of life anywhere in the building. Nothing. A perfect quiet. Tony rears back, lifting his boot, knee hugging his chest.
High as you can, Gary tells him. Got to get the lock.
Tony grunts, then kicks up like a wild mule, his boot leaving a perfect imprint of grey dust on the painted door.
The second kick cracks the hinge. The third knocks down the door and they’re inside another man’s living room. Gary roams off into the apartment to take stock.
It’s the perfect mission, all form and function as they wrap the small television, the clock radio, and a few small kitchen appliances in Hefty bags and drag them out the apartment door and down the stairs. Then Gary goes back outside for the dolly, and in a minute or so, they’ve emptied the refrigerator. Lifting it up and out of the kitchen, they roll it toward the apartment door. They’ve got the monster halfway across the threshold when Gary notices a third-floor tenant smirking at him from the landing. His heart in his throat, Gary looks back at the man, then over at Tony, who’s still inside the apartment.
“Hey,” says Gary to the tenant, his voice friendly enough.
The man shakes his head.
Gary waits for Tony to poke his head around the door frame, and for a few seconds, the three of them are standing there with the game clock running, staring at each other stupidly. Again, Gary tries to break the ice.
“Hey, well … I’m sayin’ …”
“You hook me up,” says the man, interrupting, “and I won’t say nuthin’ ’bout it.”
Without so much as a sales pitch, they’re all back in business for the price of a single blast. Gary and Tony are laughing about this new twist all the way to Baltimore Street, rolling the refrigerator with the Hefty bags wedged inside, shepherding their haul through the midday traffic, gliding past the knowing smiles of a few players hanging in front of the grocery at Mount and Baltimore.
A police cruiser passes them on Baltimore, turning at Gilmor, but the two barely tense. Time has taught them that once on the street, they are invisible. The refrigerator, the dolly, the two fiends lugging it toward a cash sale—all of it is unseen by a police department that has neither the will nor the temperament to investigate property crimes. Here, too, the drug war has upended the priorities. Why stop two fiends and ask a few questions about the refrigerator? Why take the time to ask to see a receipt? Why bother to listen to their bullshit about moving their grandmother’s refrigerator, full up as it is with smaller appliances, to their uncle’s house? Why bother to call back to the Western desk to find out if anyone has reported a burglary in the area? Why suffer through anything that resembles police work when you can make your stat simply by rolling up on a corner and going into a tout’s pockets?
At first, it seemed incredible to Gary that he could drag large, stolen appliances from one end of the neighborhood to the other without going directly to jail, but over time, he had learned to gauge the priorities of the rollers working Fayette Street. Most of the police were about the drugs; they lived off the corner arrest, and for Gary and Tony, there would always be more risk when they went down Vine Street to cop than when they broke into someone’s home. The important thing right now was not to look furtive or nervous. Just keep pushing this big white mountain down the street like it’s no one’s business.
On Baltimore Street, they get sixty-five dollars.
Walking back up the hill, Gary cuts through Vincent, hoping to meet up with one of the touts selling the Death Row package. An alley street between Mount and Gilmor, Vincent Street just north of Baltimore is a bombed-out string of vacant Formstone rowhouses, home now to an occasional shooting gallery or a corner crew using the rubble to work a package. Death Row was here yesterday, with lookouts at both ends of the block and a stash in one of the rotting basements, but there’s no sign of them today.
“The mentality,” says Gary.
“Huh?”
“I’m sayin’, you know, it was his neighbor and all.”
Tony laughs.
“No, really. You think on it and you see, the mentality out here is just amazing.”
“All in the game,” says Tony, unperturbed.
“Yeah, but when it’s your neighbor …”
Gary can’t let it go, this idea that some moral thresholds still exist, that one had been crossed by the third-floor tenant in the Fulton Avenue house. They were out here thieving, true, but it wasn’t from their neighbor. Gary couldn’t imagine ever being so trifling and low as to betray a next-door neighbor for the price of a blast.
“… I’m sayin’ it wadn’t right.”
“Hmm,” says Tony.
“I’m sayin’ he shouldn’t get a blast for doin’ that kind of dirt. He shouldn’t prosper from that.”
“No, indeed.”
“An’ you know that he don’t even know us from Adam.”
Gary clucks softly, shaking his head, muttering on about the sad mentality of some people, about the general lack of righteousness in the world. Coming out the alley at Fayette Street, he spots something in a fresh pile of debris on the vacant lot, something half covered by a soiled mattress.
“Praise be,” he says, off on a new vector.
Tony waits at the edge of the lot, impatient to find Ronnie and get a little something in his veins. But Gary is rooting through the trash heap, liberating a few scraps of green aluminum and a heavy, grooved slate of steel alloy.
“Gary, c’mon.”
“No, hey, Tony …”
He gestures until his partner finally joins him. Gary points out the remains of some kind of table saw or band saw, battered beyond repair but worth a buck or two nonetheless at the United Iron scales.
“Gary, we done for the day.”
“Tomorrow,” says Gary. “You got to always think about tomorrow bein’ there. We can sell this.”
“Man, later for it.”
But Gary is now rambling on about the ant and the grasshopper, about the smart squirrel storing up his acorns for winter. He looks around for a stash hole, deciding finally on one of the abandoned houses.
“You’ll see,” says Gary. “That’s twenty, right from jump.”
It’s an argument that Tony can’t dispute though he shows his impatience, suffering and pouting as he helps Gary drag the metal remnants back down the alley.
They resume their victory march up the strip, locating Ronnie on the sofa in the front room of her sister’s place, just a few doors up from Ella Thompson’s apartment. Ronnie, in turn, locates a half-dozen Spider Bags and some Pink Tops, and they adjourn happily to the second floor of Gary’s empty dream palace at 1717 Fayette. There, they break out the spikes and bottle caps, bending themselves to the business at hand.
The Corner Page 27