The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  Slowly, and with as much honesty as he can summon, he tells her what he should have told her months ago. He wants the baby, of course. But he can no longer lie about wanting Tyreeka. Not now anyway. Not with so much happening on McHenry Street.

  “Reeka, I’m saying you got to do what you think is right, but I got to tell you that having the baby isn’t gonna keep me around. I ain’t gonna be with you only because you got my child.”

  “I know.”

  But DeAndre hears her and senses that until this moment, she didn’t know. Until now, she was still hoping.

  “So what you gonna do?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Treecee say you was gonna go to the hospital, see about an abortion.”

  “I might, but I ain’t got the money.”

  DeAndre looks at Tyreeka, wondering if this is a game, but unwilling to accuse her of such a thing.

  “How much?”

  “Two hundert.”

  DeAndre nods.

  “You ain’t got it?”

  DeAndre shakes his head, stands, and looks away. “I’ll have to ask my mother,” he says finally.

  “As steady slinging as you been?” asks Tyreeka, doubting.

  “I’m not slinging.”

  “Then what you doing down here?”

  “I’m jus’ with my boys.”

  Tyreeka tells him that she needs the money soon, that she’s going to the clinic at University Hospital today to make an appointment. DeAndre acknowledges this and Tyreeka, with nothing left to say, leaves for Dena’s house.

  DeAndre heads back to McHenry and Gilmor wondering. If he doesn’t come up with money, does that mean Tyreeka will have his baby? And if he does give her two hundred, how does he know that the money will go for an abortion? And how does he even know that an abortion costs two hundred?

  Still, he’s resolved. He owes Tyreeka this much at least: He’ll wait on Fran, catch her in a good mood, and ask for the money. If Fran comes up with it, the better for DeAndre. If she doesn’t, then DeAndre can always come through with some corner money. Either way, he’ll step up and do what’s right. If Tyreeka wants the baby, fine. If she doesn’t, fine, too. But either way, it’s on her.

  As DeAndre reaches Gilmor, shortstops a blunt, and announces, with obvious pride, that he just might be a father, Tyreeka arrives at Dena’s house. She is resolved: She will expect nothing more from DeAndre McCullough. He doesn’t want her, and now, finally, she has no illusions about this. As far as she can tell, he doesn’t even want the baby.

  All right then, she thinks. At least I played him for two hundred dollars.

  For Tyreeka, what remains of her first real romantic adventure is the chance to get some bills from the father of her child. She has no intention of getting an abortion. In her heart, she always knew she would keep the baby. A few nights ago, she actually thought she felt something move inside her and that, more than anything, really decided it. No, she was only going to University with Treecee to see what R.C.’ s girl might do, to check out the way it worked in case you changed your mind. One thing she already knew: University Hospital didn’t charge teenage mothers anything for abortions, leastways there was no up-front charge that stopped you from getting an abortion. Whatever DeAndre thought about her, Tyreeka could tell herself she was no longer the young thing of a year ago. She was learning, and she had it in mind to give DeAndre a lesson or two.

  Back on Gilmor Street, the summer light finally fades and the trafficking begins in earnest. DeAndre stands outside the carryout with his boys, soaking up the night and basking in whatever pride results when a young man’s seed finds purchase.

  “Got to get my shit together if I’m gonna be a father.”

  In West Baltimore, it’s a stock comment. DeAndre speaks the words just to hear how they sound.

  R. C. readily agrees with him. “Treecee gonna find out soon enough. If she pregnant, I’m gonna need to deal with it like a man.”

  “Most definitely,” DeAndre says.

  For R.C., too, there isn’t much of a relationship left with the mother-to-be. When Treecee isn’t kissing him, she’s trying to cut him with a blade for any number of offenses. Just last week, R.C. had to get the webbing of one hand stitched back together—an injury that R.C. blamed on his growing interest in Dena, friend to Treecee and Tyreeka both. Others said Treecee was just tired of getting yelled at and slapped. Either way, a trip to the University Hospital emergency room was not the best portent of domestic bliss, but no matter: A baby would suit R.C. fine.

  For the time being, what remains for these fathers-to-be is to take hold of what joy remains in the summer. For Tae and R.C., that means slinging on McHenry Street and spending the profits. For DeAndre, it means trying to get others to sling for you, then complaining when there are no profits to spend. Still, there are girls and weed and misadventure to be had—every night of every day of every week while the weather stays warm.

  As far as DeAndre is concerned, the only real problem is, once again, his mother. For weeks now, he’s been coming home at three or four in the morning, creeping up the Dew Drop stairs with Phillie blunt and St. Ides on his breath, trying to make as little noise as possible. But Fran’s the nosleepingest woman he’s ever known, and in the morning, she would be yelling at him, threatening him, telling him that if he didn’t get home earlier she’d be locking the door on him. Worse, she actually threatened to call Miss Owens, his probation agent, and ask that her son be piss-tested.

  “She gonna find all that weed and you be back on home monitor,” she’d told him a week earlier.

  The threat made DeAndre furious. To his mind, it was against every moral precept for his own mother to invoke the authorities. A mother went to court and backed her child; she did not offer aid and comfort to a police or prosecutor, judge or probation officer.

  “You gonna snitch me out?” he asked.

  “If you ain’t in here at midnight I am.”

  “I’m a grown man. I can come and go as I please.”

  “You can go all right. But you ain’t comin’ back in here after midnight. You try and you’ll be out of doors.”

  “I deal with that then.”

  “You think you grown,” Fran told him, “but you ain’t.”

  That night, at about three in the morning, he tried creeping up the stairs only to find the apartment door bolted from the inside. He knocked lightly at first, then louder, bringing both Uncle Stevie and his mother out of bed. Stevie on his own would have yielded, but Fran wouldn’t budge. DeAndre had to walk up to Saratoga Street and crash at Scoogie’s place.

  The next afternoon, he and his mother had it out again, with DeAndre insisting that Fran had no right to tell him what to do and Fran asserting that she had every right if he wanted to live at 1625 Fayette Street.

  “Ain’t nobody want to live here,” DeAndre told her. “We in a damn drug house.”

  “Then you ain’t got to live here. You can leave whenever you ready, but as long as you under my roof, you comin’ in at midnight and you not comin’ in with what’s been on your breath.”

  “Please …”

  “Andre, I smell that shit on you again, I’m calling Miss Owens and telling her to piss you.”

  He stormed out, but that night, at 11:58 exactly, he reappeared at the apartment door, stalked silently past his mother, and slumped in front of the television. He wasn’t sure that Fran would actually call to get him violated, but that right there was the problem: He wasn’t sure.

  The midnight curfew so vexes DeAndre that he finds new reason to hope that his mother follows through on her effort to get a detox bed. If BRC comes through, Fran gets a twenty-eight-day break from drugging; DeAndre gets a twenty-eight-day break from Fran. Until then, though, what remains for DeAndre are the precious hours between sundown and midnight, when the wasteland of McHenry Street is C.M.B.’ s playground. One night, they’re hanging by the phone on Fulton, trying to get some girls to take them upstairs to a rowhouse bedroom. Next
night, they’re out in front of the grocery at Gilmor Street, selling enough to get them all down to Harbor Park for the bloodletting of a Saturday night horror flick. And when nothing much seems to be happening, when they’re just lazing around the Lemmon Street alley, blunting up and talking trash, an opportunity for adventure now and then presents itself. Like the night one of the local stickup artists comes through off duty, stumbling into the entire C.M.B. crew.

  “You got the time?” he asks. An icebreaker.

  Tae shakes his head. “I don’t know the time, but I know who you are. You the motherfucker who robbed me last week.”

  R.C. steps up first, banging the man on the back of the head with a grape soda bottle, and from there it gets ugly. Tae, Dinky, DeAndre, Boo, R.C.—all of them get their shots in, working their victim until he staggers into the light of Calhoun Street, a bloody wreck.

  “We fucked him up,” declares R.C. at the next day’s basketball practice. It’s one of the summer’s highlights and it’s weeks before anyone in the crew can stop telling the story of the righteous beating inflicted. That will be the last time, they assure listeners, that one nigger will even dream about robbing anyone with C.M.B. credentials.

  A month later, at summer’s end, it happens again, when Boo jumps off a concrete step in the rear of Steuart Hill Elementary to label a gaunt figure passing through the schoolyard as another stickup boy.

  “Nigger robbed my brother an’ me,” Boo says, glaring.

  “That boy there?” asks Tae.

  “The nigger with the doo-rag. Him.”

  The man never quite knows what hit him. No parley. No pause for explanation. This time Dinky gets the first shot in—a hard right to the jaw—and the man crumples to the sidewalk. The others begin kicking him. Boo cracks a small liquor bottle over the man’s head, drawing blood, and DeAndre takes a shot or two as the prey struggles to his feet and runs, lurching as far south as Ramsay before losing his tormentors. Only after they form up again does Boo express the slightest doubt.

  “He looked like him, anyways,” Boo says, shrugging.

  “Say what?” asks Dinky.

  “I’m sayin’ it might be the same boy …”

  Dinky looks at DeAndre and rolls his eyes.

  “Boo an asshole,” R.C. says, shaking his head.

  “Twos Gary,” shouts Paul from the counter. “We need twos.”

  “Half a minute, Mo,” Gary yells back, shouting back at the manager through the plastic-strip barrier, his voice carrying through the cold air of the sorting room.

  “How we doin’ on twos?” he asks his brother, who’s perched by the sorting bins, flinging crabs like a machine, breaking down a bushel of males by size.

  “We awright,” says Cardy, without looking up. “Those are females over there, but the rest of them twos behind me.”

  “Okay, Chief,” says Gary, “I’m on it.”

  He rushes back to the far corner of the refrigerated room, lifting two bushels at once and carrying them over to the stun tanks. The crabs are slow in the cold, but a couple manage to reach through the slats and grab Gary’s sweatshirt.

  “Oh no, Mo, that won’t do,” says Gary, balancing the bushels on the corner lip of the tank. He slaps at the claws until they retreat behind the cheap pine.

  He drops the top basket to the floor, pries the lid off the other, and begins sorting—live ones into the ice water, dead ones into an empty bushel basket at his feet.

  “Need twos,” Paul shouts again.

  “I’m on it, Chief.”

  At flank speed, he sorts out one bushel, then the next, before yanking at the tank chain and bringing its metal tray up to the edge of the lip. He uses one arm to shove the stunned, ice-covered crabs over the side into a wheeled crab pot.

  “Dust,” shouts Gary.

  Bobby throws a layer of spice onto the crabs. Gary swings his arm again, dropping another few dozen into the pot.

  “Dust ’em, Mo.”

  Bobby puts on another layer.

  “Okay, Boss. We hummin’ now. We on the move and not a moment too soon. Our public out there waitin’.”

  He drags the pot through the orange plastic strips and into the intense heat of the steamers. Here, in the counter area, with the crab pots boiling in an August swelter, a double layer of sweats are no advantage.

  “Number twos,” he shouts with pride, hooking a steam hose to the back of the pot. He races to the control panel, clicks to fourteen minutes on hose four, then punches the green button. Behind him, the pot hisses to life.

  Watching from the register, Paul gives an affirming nod. Gary turns to face the waiting customers on the other side of the counter. “Be good to go in just a few, folks.”

  He turns back into the steam cloud and feels the scratch in his throat. Gary has the same seafood allergy as his son, but for a payday, he’ll handle it. For this kind of cash, in fact, Gary McCullough will put up with just about anything. In a few weeks time, he’s transformed himself from a petty thief into the hardest working crab-slinger in Southwest Baltimore.

  “How you fixed now, Chief,” he asks Paul.

  Paul, a son-in-law to Seapride’s owner, checks the front bins and pronounces himself satisfied. “We’re okay for now. We might need more females in a bit.”

  “You got it, Boss. You got it.”

  Gary retreats into the back room, where he grabs a bushel of females and sorts them into the ice water. He’s ahead of the game now—at least until the late-afternoon rush. He looks around for his Newports and finds them on the back wall, atop a spice box.

  “Gonna have me a smoke,” he tells his brother.

  Cardy nods without looking up from the bins. Gary meanders back through the steam and around the front counter, pulling up at the pay phone in front of the crabhouse. He opens the foil and taps one out.

  He’s a working man now, a full-pack man. No more sliding the Korean twenty-five cents through the Plexiglas and getting back a single stick. No sir, Gary has a new game now—one that pays cash money at the end of every day, six solid days a week.

  He lights up, stretches, and watches the hillbilly parade go by on Monroe Street. The smoke actually seems to help his asthma, though he knows that doesn’t make sense. Still, he works it down to the filter. A job, a full pack of smokes—might even give the kitchen girls a couple bills and get some fries for lunch. Gary is living large.

  It’s been like this since Cardy hooked him up at Seapride, with a promise to Paul and Ron and Miss Mary that his older brother was a hard worker. And it was no lie; Gary was proving that to everyone. Apart from Cardy and maybe Bobby Short, the other veteran sorter, he was the best they had. No complaints, no arguments—he could see what needed to get done and then did it. He’d come in early to clean the pots or stay late to handle the overload on a busy night, and as long as the bosses were willing to forgive an occasional twenty-minute absence—when Gary had to attend to his medical affairs—they couldn’t help but be pleased.

  And Gary was just as happy. With a job, he was on a different road entirely. He didn’t have to worry about where the next blast was coming from; he didn’t have to run capers anymore. Like anything else, of course, the crabhouse had its downside. Even through heavy rubber gloves, a crab jockey could take a nasty cut from a half-inch shell point, or risk a serious burn when a steam hose got loose, or take a mean pinch from a number thirty-two male willing to fight to stay out of that ice bath. But for Gary, such hazards paled in comparison to the pain that comes from a caper gone awry, or the humiliation of asking a dealer to take short money for a vial, or worst of all, the fear that comes on those nights when luck doesn’t hold and the Western District rollers catch you where you’re not supposed to be.

  Seapride was keeping all of that at arm’s length. The job meant money enough for the blast, for smokes, for a little something every month to kick back to his mother to help with groceries, gas and electric. It meant waking up every morning with a vial or two left over, so that the snake
could have no say. It meant that Tony, Will, and Lump didn’t matter so much, and better yet, that the Gaunt One didn’t matter at all.

  Gary proved that the day Ronnie bailed out of women’s detention, coming home from the drug charge that the Western knockers gave her last month. She’d done pretty much what the corner expected her to do, playing the police the way she played everyone else, promising that she’d give them Gee Money and Dred and every other dealer they mentioned, so long as they’d lose sight of her charge. Of course, she planned to do nothing of the kind, figuring that any deal with the police was a deal worth breaking. Instead, she asked for Gary and was told about the crabhouse.

  And what a moment it was when Ronnie walked up to the counter looking to drag him out on some messed-up caper, taking him for the same clown. Gary let her wait there, walking back into the sorting room and going about his business, letting her know that he had the ultimate hustle now: He was on the clock. Ronnie lost it, ranting and shouting, then crying the blues about how she’d always loved him, how she’d sacrificed for him and been there for him when he was down. She made such a scene that Gary had to drag her outside the crabhouse and send her away, telling her face-to-face that things were different, that he’d be making an honest dollar now.

  Naturally, working life wasn’t altogether perfect at first. In the beginning, Seapride paid him on Thursdays—once a week, like working men everywhere get paid. That didn’t cut it; Gary had needs. The paycheck had to be an everyday thing, not only because the snake was waiting, but because having a couple hundred dollars in his hand at any one moment could kill him. At first, Gary had his mother come down to the crabhouse on Thursdays before he got off work, so she could hold most of that money for him. After a few weeks, though, Paul got a sense of the situation. Without ever having to speak the words, Gary was able to make his need plain to Paul, who, in turn, brought Ron and Mary and the rest of the family to an understanding of sorts. Gary would work hard—all day, every day—and come the end of the shift, he’d be rewarded right from the cash drawer. He got six an hour, which was pretty grim compared to the money he used to make—sixteen an hour at Beth Steel and almost ten as a security guard—but life was a lot simpler now. Everything had been boiled down to basics; some things were possible and some were not.