The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  “That’s Pooh,” Ella told her, half-relieved. “She’s calling to see if anyone’s around. Next time, let it ring.”

  But there were no more calls, and nothing from the police.

  When she returned home that night, Ella moved restlessly around the apartment. On the six o’clock news, one of the television stations had a breaking story about the body of an unidentified woman dis covered in an alley behind the 1800 block of West Baltimore Street. There was nothing more to it—no suggestion that the body was anything but an adult female—yet from the moment she heard the broadcast, Ella knew. Her fears, carefully suppressed all day long, overwhelmed her.

  When the doorbell rang later that evening, Ella looked at the uniformed officer and spoke his mind: “I know you found her.”

  Donnie’s face twisted in absolute horror. Tito picked up the television set and smashed it in a rage. He and Kiti, just a year older than Pooh, began shouting wildly, talking about going out on the street and finding the man. Killing him. Ella was in shock, numb, unable to find any words at all. She tried to pray, but her mind wandered.

  “Why?” she finally asked the officer.

  He shook his head.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” she said.

  She kept her children together, weeping, in the front room. She called other family members with the news.

  An hour after the first officer arrived, the homicide detectives came and took them all downtown for interviews, asking many more questions than they could answer. It didn’t matter. Soon Ella learned all she needed to know. Andrea had been found tucked behind a low wall just off the alley, killed instantly by a.32 bullet fired into the back of her head. There was evidence of sexual assault. Autopsies, evidence submissions, lab reports—the chaos of a death investigation swirled around her.

  Days later, Ella learned that Pooh had probably not gone straight home from the bus stop, that she had gone over to a friend’s house on Payson Street to show off her new hairstyle. Days after that, she heard of a second crime in the neighborhood—a second rape involving a young girl whose life was this time spared by the man who assaulted her. Eventually she heard from the detectives about the arrest of that man, about how they searched his apartment and found a .32 revolver, how the bullet taken from her daughter’s body had been fired from that weapon.

  Andrea’s murderer, a sociopath named Eugene Dale, was a stranger to Fayette Street, a man only recently paroled from state prison, where he had served a sentence for sexual assault. Although he had on occasion copped vials from the corners, he was not a hardcore user and not known among the Fayette Street regulars. Yet the strip was the strip, and the frenzy of slinging and hustling that brought hundreds to the corners every day allowed Dale the right kind of anonymity. Dope and coke had obscured all else on Fayette Street, so that only the old-timers remembered a community where neighbors once knew each other’s business and could mark a stranger from the earliest moment. Among the crews and customers along Fayette and Lexington and Baltimore Streets —black and white, west siders and east siders, locals and wanderers—Eugene Dale was a small, faceless part of the street parade.

  The disorder along Fayette Street not only offered anonymity to Eugene Dale, it provided the kind of broken terrain that allowed him to lure victims in broad daylight. The rape of the second neighborhood girl—the event that provided the break in the case—had occurred in a vacant house on Gilmor Street. The half-renovated rowhouse was empty because the young woman who owned it had herself been murdered by a dope-and-coke user she had naively employed to help rehab the property. For weeks after the murder, with the half-furnished house empty and available, Eugene Dale could have come and gone from it as he pleased, no questions asked. It was here that he could have raped Andrea before killing her in the alley. What is known is that one day, two weeks after Andrea was found, Dale walked down the strip with a young girl in tow, entered the vacant house through the front door, showed the child his gun, and raped her in the dead woman’s bedroom. Then he walked her back into the street mix, telling the child on her way home that if she spoke to anyone he would shoot her. To emphasize the point, Dale told the young girl that he had already used his gun on another girl—a girl who threatened to tell.

  The young victim told her mother. That night, the police kicked in Eugene Dale’s door.

  These were by no means crimes of the corner. You looked at Eugene Dale and you saw nothing but an ugly hunger behind hollow, empty eyes—that otherworldly stare to which Curt or Blue or Eggy Daddy could never pretend. At their worst, the corner regulars were petty and larcenous and tragic; Eugene Dale was evil. But if Andrea’s murder was not a crime of the corner, it was nonetheless a crime that the corner made easy. Vial by vial, this part of West Baltimore had been stripped down past the point of social legitimacy, until it served no human connections beyond those required to buy and sell drugs. Those lost to the corner might not themselves use and destroy a young girl, but over time they had created the ideal world for anyone who could.

  In the end, Ella used what solace she could find in that small distinction. She would not judge her world by Eugene Dale; she would not see the neighborhood where she had lived her life through his solitary deed. Instead, she put all her faith in Dale’s otherness, exempting him from the rest of Fayette Street. This kind of thing, she told herself, could happen anywhere; it did happen anywhere.

  Ella went to the arraignment and testified at the trial. She walked slowly past Eugene Dale on her way to the stand, sensing his eyes on her yet managing to avert her gaze the entire time. She felt excluded when the jurors were shown the crime scene photographs, felt as if they had possession over her daughter in a way that she did not. And when she stumbled upon Dale’s mother in a courthouse hallway, she graciously accepted a pained apology, then spoke gently to the woman, telling her that it wasn’t her fault—it wasn’t anyone’s fault—that sometimes children grow up and do things for which there is no possible explanation.

  “I don’t hate him,” she told people who asked. “I hate what he did, but I don’t hate him.”

  She worked hard on Donnie, trying to convince her daughter that she wasn’t responsible for what happened, that the bus stop was only a block away from home, that Pooh was old enough to go anywhere in the neighborhood before dinnertime and that this tragedy could have happened in a dozen different ways. She struggled with Tito, who had such an explosive anger. And Kiti, the most sensitive of her children, who seemed almost to disappear into silence after Andrea was killed. Most of all, she refused to find any lesson in the event—she refused to believe that this price had been exacted by something greater than the sum of one man’s cruelty.

  Ella took no issue with the fact that in the days after the slaying, no one—not a soul—had called the police with any viable information. It was cold that night, she reasoned, and more likely than not, the alley was deserted when her daughter was shot. If the homicide detectives never heard from anyone who saw Andrea Perry earlier that day, Ella was willing to attribute it to bad fortune, rather than to the anonymous chaos of a drug marketplace. That no one saw the killer approach the girl, or walk with her, or touch her—Ella reasoned that the two might have been visible together on the street for only a brief instant. Ella Thompson, who had made a home and raised a family and lived a worthy life on Fayette Street, insisted on regarding the violence as random, and she excused the deathly silence of the neighborhood as genuine ignorance, not evidence of communal betrayal.

  The prosecutors matched Eugene Dale’s DNA sample to the semen recovered at autopsy. They asked for the death penalty, and Ella was secretly relieved when the jury came back with a verdict of life without parole. I just don’t want him to be where he can hurt anyone else, she told her family.

  And then, when most people would cease to believe in anything beyond their own pain, Ella Thompson did an unlikely thing. When anyone else would have fled, or raged, or lost themselves in grief, Ella went down to the threadbare nei
ghborhood recreation center and gave herself over to the children of her neighborhood.

  The rec center was Pooh. At night, when the furnace made strange noises, Ella knew it was Andrea, letting her mother know she was there. When laughter filled the playground, when the finger paints were smeared on tabletops, when the younger ones all crowded around the television to watch Disney videos—Pooh was with her, watching and sharing. In her apartment, too—the apartment where Andrea had spent all twelve years—Ella sensed her missing child; especially at night, Pooh was a comforting, invisible presence.

  Ella couldn’t leave Fayette Street. That would be leaving Pooh. And now, after years of loving work, she also couldn’t give up on what she had created in that cinder-block bunker. If she did—if she went elsewhere for a better job, or more money—she would be giving up on Andrea. And without the rowhouses and vacant lots and alleys along Fayette Street to form a map of the heart, how would Pooh be able to find her way home?

  By New Year’s, the garden will be awash in the usual corner traffic, the flower beds again marred by food wrappers and needles and forty-ounce bottles. A walk down the alley off Mount will crackle with the sound of spent vials underfoot, a graveyard of used euphoria, grinding down to sand. But Ella Thompson will still walk past the empty lot with absolute knowledge of her place and purpose in the world. Come the new year, she’ll still be talking about how the city is promising to re-tar the blacktop and maybe replace the basketball rims. She’ll be convinced that this is the year when there will be money to get the rec center roof fixed, or to repair the furnace, or to buy some new board games. Come the spring, she’ll get the kids together and clean the garden, add more topsoil and replant. And by May, she knows, the flowers will be back.

  The future on Fayette Street, so far as Ella can see it, is still unwritten. The probabilities are there, of course, but the possibilities are just that—they, too, might still have their say. This year, Blue got clean and taught art. And Fran Boyd, she seemed to be trying; by next year, she might make it. This year, Ella had a basketball team; next year, they might win another game. This year was ending with DeAndre and R.C. and Dinky—all of her boys—out on the corners, doing wrong; next year, they might turn around, come home, do what’s right.

  This year, there had been a shooting gallery at 1702.

  Now, in that same spot, Pooh has a garden.

  On the day of the memorial garden’s dedication, Ella Thompson’s feelings are too strong to allow for clear thought. But that night, she goes home and allows herself to imagine better days. She gives herself some credit for the journey, for all that her work has brought and all that it might still bring. She’s happy with the park. The flowers. The wooden sign.

  A week after the dedication, she walks out of her apartment, looks up and down Fayette Street, then steps back through the vestibule and into her living room. She fumes for a moment or two, allowing the anger to pass, before calling the police and reporting her gray Oldsmobile as stolen.

  Neighborhood kids, Ella tells herself. Joyriding.

  She buttons her overcoat, chooses a blue beret from the front closet and then checks the lock on the apartment door. Walking down her steps, she sees Fat Curt shivering on the corner at Fulton.

  “Hey, Mister Curt.”

  Curt nods, ever gracious.

  “Cold out today,” she offers.

  “Yes indeed,” says Fat Curt. “The hawk is out.”

  “You take care.”

  “You too, dear,” says Curt.

  Ella Thompson walks to work.

  He’s going against the grain now, crossing Calhoun, then Carey, heading east down Saratoga and past the looming, half-empty towers of Lexington Terrace.

  For Gary McCullough, anything east of Stricker Street or north of the expressway had never held much promise. Those directions had been played out years ago, with all the copper and aluminum stripped off and sold. Lately there had been a brief revival, when the housing authority spent some money rehabbing units in the low-rises and in a couple of the Terrace towers, but for the most part, the fiends had done the locust work on everything between Martin Luther King Boulevard and Sandtown-Winchester. True, Gary’s neighborhood was played out as well, with every vacant address now yielding little more than two-cents-a-pound bulk metal. But that left south and west—south into the hillbilly neighborhoods, where the metal game was just getting started; west against the home-owners-under-siege who were still fighting the good fight on the other side of Hilltop.

  Yet on this late December day, Gary is marching east into the empty and open maw of the ghetto, following the Gaunt One on a mission of her own device and choosing. Ronnie Boice is once again leading her charge into battle, and Gary, like any down-in-the-trenches soldier, tells himself it’s not his to wonder why. Today it’s Ronnie’s caper and so Ronnie is in command. Today, Gary’s a grunt.

  “Dag,” he tells her as they cross Arlington, “these houses been picked clean.”

  Ronnie ignores him. She’s not interested in metal today; she’s got another plan. And Gary, who knows enough of what she has in mind to follow, is only pretending to be scouting metal lodes to occupy his mind on the journey.

  “We cuttin’ up at the boulevard, right?”

  Ronnie mutters.

  “We can cut up that way.”

  Ronnie says nothing.

  “Dag, we don’t got to walk all the way downtown.”

  But Ronnie is cautious, keeping to the main stems, avoiding any neighborhood that might bring them into contact with people who know her, some of whom Ronnie has burned before. For Ronnie, most of West Baltimore must be negotiated as an interpersonal minefield.

  “We come up from the bottom,” she tells Gary finally.

  And they do, heading up Martin Luther King to Pennsylvania and then marching north by northwest along what’s left of the Avenue, once the grand boulevard of black Baltimore, now a broken shell of itself. At Pennsie and Bloom Street, they go to work.

  Ronnie plays the tout; Gary holds the stash. He’s out there on an alien corner, a dark-skinned lamppost amid the Pennsie whores and the johns and the other dealers, holding a handful of B-and-Q burn bags and waiting for Ronnie to talk her talk and send a stray customer or two his way.

  And damned if it doesn’t work the way she said it would. Damned if they don’t unload enough sham heroin to finance their own happy blast. Ronnie’s eye for the amateur ensures that most of the customers are single-shot strays, less-than-hardcore types who are up at Pennsylvania and Bloom for the whores more than the dope. These customers won’t come back on you when they learn the nasty truth; they’re from some other neighborhood and they wouldn’t know where to find you again even if they wanted to.

  At least this is the way Gary wants and needs to see it. It’s Gary, after all, who’s up front, serving up nothing for hard-earned something. It’s Gary who is cast in the title role of burn artist, standing out there amidst the passing traffic. If this caper goes bad, the bullet will belong to Gary. For Ronnie Boice, the lady of a thousand capers, a projectile with her name scratched into its brass casing has yet to be minted.

  Burdened by his own need, Gary has no chance to assess the risk or, more pointedly, to acknowledge that he’s once again being grandly used by his girl. He’s no longer playing his own game. In fact, he’s no longer bothering to distinguish between viable capers and sheer folly.

  Selling B-and-Q gets people killed, and selling B-and-Q on a strange corner in an alien neighborhood gets them killed that much faster. Yet in less than a half hour, Gary has cash money in his pocket and he’s once again a half step behind his lady love, marching up Brunt to Gold Street and down toward Division, looking for a real drug dealer selling real drugs. In his view, this outcome is argument enough to play at almost anything.

  Ronnie will see them through; she carries the team, she makes it happen. Like now, when she brings their fresh profit up to a strange corner and comes back with a good blast, then finds her way
to a cheap needle palace on Brunt Street. Tallyho, thinks Gary. That’s my girl.

  On the way back down Pennsylvania Avenue, he’s immersed in happy fog, reassured that he can still play this game, that he will somehow get from one day to the next and survive. He can adapt. He doesn’t need to feed crabs into a steamer for hours on end; damned if he hasn’t been cut back to one day a week at Seapride now anyway. And he doesn’t need the metal game either; so what if the neighborhoods around him have all been stripped down to bone? You say that his old running buddy, Tony Boice, is locked up, over at City Jail somewhere? Well then, daytime burglary is out. And that there’s too much risk in playing tour guide to white kids? Fine. No problem. Something will always come along. And if nothing comes along, then Ronnie will always be there for him, waiting with some new means of getting it done and requiring only that Gary do his able-bodied part.

  Walking back down Pennsie, warmed against the cold, Gary admits that a part of him actually loves her. Strangely enough, he feels the same thing coming back at him.

  “We can do this tomorrow,” he tells her.

  “If you want.”

  “Maybe a different corner, though.”

  “Naw,” she says, quietly assertive. “We okay right there.”

  They cross the boulevard after sundown, dodging rush-hour headlights, Gary dreaming of a triumphant return to Pennsie and Bloom, this time with double the ration of trash.

  Ronnie wants to turn at Saratoga, but Gary drags her across the street, over toward St. Mary’s Park, where Bruce Epps—Blue’s brother—is living on one of the rehabbed streets. Bruce had partnered with Gary, when Lightlaw, Gary’s contracting company, was up and running. Now Gary is in the wind and Bruce, by local standards, is living right.

  “I want to show you this one street,” Gary tells her.

  “What?”