Читать книгу The Corner - David Simon - Страница 9

ONE

Fat Curt is on the corner.

He leans hard into his aluminum hospital cane, bent to this ancient business of survival. His fattened, needle-scarred hands will never again see the deep bottom of a trouser pocket; his forearms are swollen leather; his bloated legs mass up from the concrete. But then obese limbs converge on a withered torso: At the heart of the man, Fat Curt is fat no more.

“Yo, Curt.”

Turning slightly, Curt watches Junie glide over from the other side of Fayette, heading into Blue’s for the evening’s last shot. Curt stops, a few feet from Blue’s door, and here’s Mr. Blue himself, standing on the front steps of what was once his mother’s pristine rowhome, scratching at the edges of his beard between arrivals, pocketing two bills from each, though it’s two more if you need a fresh tool. No charge, of course, for share and share alike.

From down the hill near Gilmor comes a short string of gunshots—too even, too deliberate for firecrackers. Barely tensing, Blue allows Junie to edge past him on the marble steps. A regular: no charge for Junie.

“They shootin’ already,” says Blue.

Curt grunts. “Motherfuckers can’t tell no time.”

Blue smiles softly, then turns to follow Junie inside.

Fat Curt slips slowly toward Monroe, reddened eyes tracking a white boy who pulls to the curb in a battered pickup. But there’s no play here; one of Gee Money’s younger touts has already laid hands on the sale.

Curt works his way around the corner to Vine, passing Bryan, who nods acknowledgment. No sale here, either; not with Bryan Sampson out here working his own tired hustle, selling that baking soda. Curt shakes his head: Bryan looking to get his ass shot up again behind that Arm & Hammer shit.

From down the hill, from somewhere around Hollins and Payson this time, comes more crackling syncopation—the beginning of the deluge to come, though it isn’t quite eleven yet. Curt shrugs it off and shuffles back toward Fayette. Time enough left, he knows, to make a little money.

“Wassup?”

Finally, a face he knows from down on Mount Street, a gaunt dark-skinned fiend, scurrying up the hill in the hope of catching a better product. Coming right at Curt.

“Wassup now?”

Curt growls assent. Shop’s open.

“Somethin’ good?”

Fat Curt, the oracle. Twenty-five years in service on these streets, and everyone knows there’s no better tout at the corner where Fayette meets Monroe. Curtis Davis is the gravel-voiced purveyor of credible information, a steadfast believer in quality control and consumer advocacy. No bullshit, no burn bags, no watered-down B-and-Q garbage. Fat Curt, a tout among touts.

“Might try ’round the way,” he says, turning and gesturing with his cane toward the entrance to Vine Street.

The fiend takes his hunger down the block as Curt gives a confirming nod to the lookout at the mouth of the alley. Slowly, the aging tout canes his way back to the corner, shuffling beneath the jaundiced glare of sodium vapor. The city has put stage lighting out here; it’s harsh and direct, openly contemptuous of the scene itself. Fat Curt is forever exposed in the ugly glow, but he can remember when dull blue light washed more gently over these deeds, a time when the neighborhood was permitted some small privacy. Now, at an hour to midnight, the corner is visible at a full block’s distance. Dope and coke. Coke and dope. Twenty-four, seven: twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

More gunshots. Fulton and Lex by the sound of it. But Curt is still on post, waiting for the next sale, when the Western uniforms roll up for a last pass at the corner. The radio cars move slowly down Monroe, but it’s not a jump-out this time, just the ceremonial eyefuck and a sullen showing of the colors.

From down near Hollins and Payson again comes a long, staccato string. Ten or twelve in a row and nine millimeter by the report. But the police ignore it, their faces instead scanning the foot traffic, their brake lights showing red.

The lookouts raise up and go. The touts, customers, and runners stream away, evaporating like mist, moving down Fayette and into the back alleys. Fat Curt, too, turns from the police cruisers, stepping cane-to-foot-to-cane so slowly that any movement is more implied than real—just enough effort to suggest a polite, territorial retreat. From experience, Curt knows that it will be a short visit, that no right-minded police will be out on these streets fifteen minutes from now.

Over his shoulder, he watches as the brake lights go dark and the cruisers roll quietly through the traffic light, first one car, then its companion heading down Monroe. Curt, having covered barely half the distance to Lexington, turns back again. Shop is still open, but the salvos are now coming seconds apart, hitting all points on the compass. Six in a row echoing from over by the hospital; the snap of a .22 up on Lexington; the roar of what has to be a shotgun from somewhere down on Fairmount.

Time to go, thinks Curt. Time to go before they’re digging some hopper’s bullet from my lonesome black ass. He staggers around the corner and up the steps to Blue’s house, rapping the front door with his cane. Blue cracks the door, then gives way; Curt slips inside. The corner watches its aging wise man; Fat Curt tells them it’s time to go and the last soldiers take heed and drift in behind him. Eggy Daddy and Hungry, then Bryan and Bread and finally Curt’s brother, Dennis, who’s got a hospital cane all his own since he spiked himself in the neck and caught some spine. One by one they cross Blue’s threshold and cluster together amid the cookers and candles and syringes, most of them waiting for Rita to make her rounds. Rita, the corner physician, works a rare magic, finding veins in cold, dying places where no living blood vessel has a right to be.

Outside, the streets are empty. No touts, no runners, no fiends. No police either, as Curt predicted. At a quarter to the hour, all the radio cars are in Western District holes, parked hood-to-trunk behind tall ware-houses and school buildings, or, better still, below something solid.

All across the west side, the distinct reports of individual shots now blend into cacophony. Down Fayette Street toward the harbor, and up Fulton toward the expressway, the bright orange-yellow of muzzle flashes speckles from front steps, windows, and rooftops. They look like fireflies amid the crescendo, beautiful in their way. A window is shattered on Monroe Street. Another on Lexington. And a block north on Penrose, some fool without sense enough to come in from the rain suddenly winces, grabs his forearm, and races for the nearest doorway to examine the wound.

The hour approaches, and the great, layered dissonance grows even louder, the flashes of light racing up and down the streets as visible proof of this explosive percussion. It is a sound both strange and familiar: the signature sound of our time, the prideful, swelling cannonade of this failed century. Shanghai. Warsaw. Saigon. Beirut. Sarajevo. And now, in this peculiar moment of celebration, West Baltimore.

On Fulton Avenue, two teenaged girls stand in the vestibule of their rowhouse, ready for a run to a girlfriend’s apartment on Lexington. They start down the steps, giggling, edging into the maelstrom, but they don’t even make the curb when the next-door neighbor appears in his doorway, grinning drunkenly, gripping a.38 long barrel with both hands in a crude military stance, aiming up into the ether.

Six flashes light the street; the girls dive back to their front stoop. Still laughing, they peek across the marble steps as the reveler returns to his vestibule, reloads, then chimes out six more in perfect sequence. Like a statuette in some bastardized Swiss timepiece, the gunman drops his arm and slides backward through the door to reload again, and the girls, having timed the process, now risk the run up Fulton. They race up the block, consumed in adolescent laughter, holding their ears against the din.

The hour itself arrives with perfect vacancy—a rare midnight with no one soldiering on the Monroe Street corners or down Fayette. No touts, no slingers, no fiends on Mount Street. No crew manning the intersection of Baltimore and Gilmor. And certainly no stray citizens either—most taxpayers with sense fled this neighborhood years ago; the few that remain are now nestled inside hallways and interior rooms, as far from a stray bullet’s reach as they can manage. Twenty blocks east, there are thousands milling around Inner Harbor promenades and downtown hotel lobbies, watching fireworks of a different kind in the night sky. But here, in West Baltimore, the celebration of sound and light requires an empty landscape.

The crescendo continues for ten full minutes before individual salvos can be distinguished from the din; another ten beyond that before the tempo slips noticeably; a full half hour before there are only odd, scattered reports from the belated few. Then, slowly, this world begins to stir. A Vine Street drunk drifts down the alley and makes for Lexington. A tout materializes on Mount, and a police radio car glides past the crumbling commercial strip on Baltimore Street. A fiend skates across Fayette and bangs on the door of Blue’s house; Blue answers, collects two bills, and peers outside at the sudden calm as the man slips wordlessly past him.

A moment or two later, Fat Curt appears. Cane-to-foot-to-cane, he moves across Blue’s vestibule and onto the front steps, pausing there to take stock. Head tipped to one side, bloodshot eyes scouring the corners from Monroe to Mount, Fat Curt is the oracle again, the keeper of this lost world’s cumulative knowledge, the presignification of whatever still passes for truth out here. He stands on the threshold like a village shaman, reading the street for the pagan hordes clustered behind him in the shooting gallery, his antennae tuned to who knows what frequency. If the fat man sees his shadow, perhaps, they’ll all stay inside and shoot dope for another half hour. If not, shop’s open.

A semiauto’s long crackle carries from somewhere down by the crabhouses, but Curt pays no mind. Too little, too late, and too far away; the flood has crested and gone. Once again, he hobbles to the corner of Fayette and Monroe, laying claim to the pavement.

Fat Curt is on the corner.

Gradually, the entire neighborhood seems to take the cue. By ones and twos, the shooting gallery gives up its wraiths; Junie and Pimp and Bread slide out onto the sidewalk and get back into their game. The touts reappear at the mouth of Vine Street. They’re back in business on Mount Street, too, where Diamond in the Raw has the best package. And around the corner on Fulton, where the Spider Bag crew has set up shop. And down the bottom at Baltimore and Gilmor, where it’s all Big Whites and Death Row and whatever else the New York Boys are using to market dope this week.

The fiends begin to drift back toward the corners. Rail-thin coke freaks and abscessed shooters press dirty singles and fives into waiting hands, then line up for the quick run down into the alley, where the slingers work ground stashes hidden in used tires, behind cinder blocks, or in the tall grass by the edge of a rear wall. Tattooed, toothless white boys, up from Pigtown in battered pickups and rusting Dodge Darts, idle nervously on Mount, watching for trouble through cracked rearview mirrors, hoping that whichever nigger took the twenty dollars is coming back with some product. Soon enough, all of them will be heading to some shithole rowhouse in absolute, dick-hard anticipation, battering their way past every remaining shard of their life to reach the room with the spikes and the pipes and the burnt-bottom bottle caps. They’ll fumble with these things impatiently, kicking the old sofa’s ass in a futile hunt for matches or jabbing themselves a dozen times in search of a vein. But at last they’ll slam it home and wait for that better-than-sex feeling to crest. Then it’s back again to the corner.

Fat Curt, up on post, watches them come. Year in and year out, he tells it true, steering them away from the trash, hooking them up to whatever will work. As always, he weds his timeworn credibility to some younger soldier’s dope.

“Who got that Gold Star?”

“Come right here with it.”

“Good as yesterday?”

“Man, that shit’s a bomb.”

“Awright then.”

By one in the morning, this night is like any other, and Curtis Davis knows that it can never end, that money and desire will not be denied. He can tell this story going back a quarter century, back to when he stood on these same corners and the game was just beginning. He had some money in those days, and God knows he had the desire. He has stayed out here nearly every night since, until only his desire remains. He was out here yesterday and he’s out here tonight, and come tomorrow, he’ll be at Monroe and Fayette, watching the same scenes play.

No point in talking about changing, or stopping, or even slowing down. In his soldier’s heart, Curt knows that everyone talks that shit and no one believes it a minute after they say it. Like Blue—running and gunning tonight, but telling himself he’s going to quit come tomorrow. A resolution, says Blue. Naw, Curt tells himself, the shit is forever.

“Yo Curt.”

“Hey, hey.”

“Wassup, Mr. Curt?”

Curt smiles sadly, then growls out simple truth: “Oh, man, ain’t nuthin’ here but some of the same foolishness.”

He touts for another hour at Fayette and Monroe, then drags himself back to Blue’s for his last blast of the night, the syringe finding a way through one of the fat man’s swollen limbs. When he leaves the shooting gallery, he’s fortified with a good cap and carrying a small eighth of cheap rye in his hand—a rare liquid concession to this evening’s traditions.

Cane-to-foot-to-cane he struggles up Monroe Street, heading nowhere in particular, wandering a bit beyond the usual boundaries of his shrunken world. Penrose Street. Saratoga. Curt limps on, nipping at the bottle and caning his way down the pavement until this short, spontaneous excursion toward the expressway overpass becomes a modest declaration of free will. Tonight in West Baltimore, for no reason whatever, Fat Curt is no longer on post. At last report, he’s left the corner traveling due north. He’s walking; goddamn if the fat man isn’t taking a walk.

At Mulberry Street, a passing Western radio car slows at the sight. Maybe the cop is pausing to consider invoking the city liquor laws, which in this neighborhood would be a little like handing out littering citations in a hurricane. More likely, a veteran roller, familiar with Fayette and Monroe, is stunned to see one of that corner’s fixtures several blocks north of where he should be. Either way, Curt senses the attention and tries to palm the bottle in his bloated hand. It’s enough of a gesture to imply submission. The cop gives a little nod, then rolls away.

Walking on, Curt almost manages to smile.

Happy New Year.

Gary McCullough waits in front of the Korean joint, just off the Mount Street corner, shifting his weight from one foot to the other in the morning cold. One hand plays at a rubber band loose against the other wrist. He hums a Curtis Mayfield tune, the notes coming soft and barely discernible beneath the din of the nearby touts and slingers. Gary is in the background, just barely scenery. He is here, yet not here. He is good at waiting.

Tony Boice comes around the corner from Mount Street, back from the marketplace, smiling knowingly at Gary. Warmed to his soul, Gary grins beatifically at his running buddy. Hooked up: got that good thing from Family Affair. Yes, oh yes. The two men turn together, pushing back up Fayette, heads bowed into a rush of frigid January wind. Gary cups a hand to his mouth and coughs deeply.

“Dag.”

“What?” says Tony Boice, looking around.

“Cold,” says Gary.

“Oh yeah,” agrees Tony. “Motherfuckin’ hawk is out.”

Gary looks furtively down Fayette, then across the street at the Death Row crew—all of them busy with business and paying no mind. They pass the trash of the vacant lot, back to where the New York Boy was lying dead a week earlier, the top of his head oozing away beneath a White Sox cap, a nine with a full clip useless in the waist of his sweats.

Gary edges past the spot and glances over despite himself; his eye finding the dull rust-red oval that still stains the weeds and dirt. Dag.

They move past the vacant lot and draw even with a redbrick rowhouse. Plywood greets them at the door of 1717 West Fayette, a street address that never fails to pull Gary back into his past.

“In here,” he decides, bounding up the steps.

“Around back,” says Tony, furtive.

“No, this’ll work,” Gary insists, suddenly impatient. He steps to the front door of the derelict house, glances once again down Fayette, then presses his weight against the plywood barrier, bending it enough to slide through. Tony follows and Gary shoves the plywood back into place. The two listen in the darkness for an extra moment, assuring themselves that the place is empty, though the piss-stench in the front hallway says it isn’t always so.

“He was okay with that?” asks Gary.

Tony Boice grunts affirmatively. Negotiations went well enough: The corner boy gave him two Death Row bags for eighteen, which was all Tony carried. Short the two bills, Tony offered lamely to have a little more on the next go-round, and the younger dealer gave it up for the cash on hand, knowing anything else was money he would never see.

By fixed memory, Gary leads the way back through the darkened corridor, turning and reaching out for the rounded rail of the center stair. He holds it a moment, remembering the beautiful curve of the thing.

“Victorian,” he says, savoring the word. “This is a Victorian design.” Tony says nothing.

“Look at that trim. That was original.”

Tony stays silent as they climb the stairs.

“Know what that means, Mo?” Gary stops at the second-floor landing. “Money. There’s big money in a house like this.”

Two steps below him. Tony stares at some lead-painted piece of shit-brown wood, no doubt wondering how there can be a dollar left anywhere inside this rowhouse. They’ve been through the place two dozen times, liberating every last bit of copper pipe and aluminum window guard, cannibalizing the vessel of Gary McCullough’s earlier life in their daily pursuit of the perfect blast. Whatever obvious money there was in this house had already been dragged ten blocks south to the scales of the United Iron and Metal Company, weighed up, paid out, and melted down. But Gary climbs to the third floor, his frozen breath clouding in front of him as he talks, rambling on about period restorations and licensed subcontractors and real estate values.

“… I’m serious as a heart attack, Mo. There’s money to be made if you know how to go. You just don’t know …”

Tony grunts his way up the stairs.

“… like with the market. Some of those technology stocks, like computer companies and all, man, I’m telling you. You can turn ten thousand dollars into ten times that inside of six months if you know what you’re doing.”

“Aw yeah,” says Tony.

“No, really,” says Gary, insistent.

“Yeah, no,” says Tony blankly. “You right.”

“Man, you just don’t know.”

And Gary McCullough, perhaps the only living person in a twenty-block radius who knows the difference between a price-earnings ratio and a short-term capital gain, shakes his head in sad frustration. The past is past, and Gary can’t reconcile any part of it with the likes of Tony Boice, who is laboring only in this moment.

“You just don’t know,” he says again.

It wasn’t so long ago that Gary had everything figured. He was a workaholic with two full-time jobs and his own home development company on the side. He held the deed on several properties on Vine Street. He drove a new Mercedes-Benz. Every workday, he scoped the inside columns of the Daily Investor for stock tips, parlaying a Charles Schwab brokerage account into $150,000 cash money. And Gary had a plan, too, for this three-story rowhouse, which had been purchased not merely as another investment, but as a centerpiece to the fine, righteous life he was busy constructing. He would renovate this place, make it beautiful again, make it his castle.

Tony slides past him on the landing, intent on nothing beyond the business at hand.

“Where at?” he asks.

“In back,” says Gary, nodding to the rear bedroom.

Gary finds two bottle caps on the windowsill, but his partner takes care of everything else. Tony is a whirlwind of efficiency as the glassine bags are opened and the powdered heroin meted out. Water from the syringes, flame from a match, then the slow draw of liquid up into the plastic cylinders. Thirty on the hype, cocked and ready. No coke to go on top, but this is enough to get them out of the gate.

Tony pokes softly at the back of his arm, a red droplet collecting there to mark the landing zone. Gary uses his left forearm, choosing a midway point on a darker brown stretch of oft-used roadway. Tony slams everything home, indifferent to the notion of an overdose. Gary sees a puff of pink in the bottom of his spike, fires, then stops short at the halfway point, gauging the rush, waiting cautiously. A few moments more with the syringe resting gently between thumb and forefinger, and then the sprint to the finish.

“It’s something,” mutters Tony, vaguely disappointed, “but not like yesterday was.”

“Yesterday was a bomb,” Gary agrees.

Tony steps back into the sunlight, which is pouring through the rear window panes, measuring a patch of crosshatched warmth on the bedroom’s stained carpet. Oblivious to the cold, Gary sits in the shade by the far wall, watching a universe of suspended dust float across the room in rays of light.

Tony nods.

“Better than you thought, Mo,” laughs Gary.

“Gettin’ there.”

For a while they simply sit, letting the chemistry happen, warming themselves in the rush. Both of them at perfect ease, feeling nothing more of the freezing cold. Soon they are laughing together about the caper that got them here.

Caper. That is Gary’s word for it, and it is Gary’s mind-set, too. For him as for any dope fiend, the raw adventure of the thing always has to be acknowledged and on some level, enjoyed. In West Baltimore, you can be proud of a good caper; hell, a working, viable caper is to be celebrated. And though it might be lost to any prosecutor reading the Maryland Annotated Code, everyone living off a corner understands and accepts the distinction between a caper and a crime. Stick a gun in a man’s face and take his wallet; that’s a crime and, hey, you’re a criminal. But steal the copper plumbing from a rowhouse under construction and sell it for scrap; that’s a caper. Shoot a corner dealer in the knee and take his stash; you’re a stickup boy and fair game for either the slingers or police. Watch the same dealer sling vials for two hours until he turns his back, and then sneak off with his ground stash; a caper, plain and simple. Breaking into a house where honest-to-God taxpayers are sleeping is definitely a crime. Breaking into parked cars and liberating cassette tape players is nothing more than caper. In Gary’s mind, it isn’t only the severity of the act that qualifies a crime, but the likelihood that any human being other than yourself might get hurt. In the life of Gary McCullough, this point is essential.

He will shoot dope, to be sure. And if there is no paycheck on the horizon, he will steal a bit to get the money for that dope. And then, if he has to—if there is no other sensible alternative—he will tell a lie or two about his stealing and his doping, though in actual practice, Gary is too honest a soul to carry a deceit past anyone in this neighborhood. But it ends with this: no crime, no cruelty, nothing beyond the simple caper. The sad and beautiful truth about Gary McCullough—a man born and raised in as brutal and unforgiving a ghetto as America ever managed to create—is that he can’t bring himself to hurt anyone.

Like this morning, when the caper almost went bad in the basement of that rowhouse on Fairmount. Gary and Tony were down there in the dark, groping for the cold water cutoff even as a half-dozen crackheads were arguing over cocaine a floor above them. He and Tony were stumbling around, bumping into things until Gary found the valve and shut off the water. They cut out that good No. 1 copper as quietly as they could, while above them the voices rose and fell in profane cadence.

“My turn.”

“Fuck it is. This mine.”

“Man, that’s my time. That ain’t right.”

“Bitch, everything I say, you hear backwards.”

Tony began squeezing air through his lips, trying to suppress laughter. Gary struggled with it, too, until they couldn’t so much as look at each other without losing control. Side by side in the dark, they were holding it together as best they could, wincing inside with each soft squeak as the pipe cutter did its work. Then, from above them, a loud, shrewish wail—a woman’s voice.

“MAW-REECE … MAW-REECE!”

“What?”

Gary and Tony froze, scared and still at the woman’s shout. Gary guessed that Tony was willing to fight if it came to it, but in his own heart, he was down for capers only. Gary would take all of an ass-whipping if Maurice brought his coked-up self downstairs.

Tony recovered first, giving the cutter another go, until one last stretch of copper came away from the plumbing with a dull thump.

“MAW-REECE!”

“What?”

“AIN‘T NO WATER IN THE TAP.”

“Say what?”

Then both of them were racing toward the back basement door, laughing through the adrenaline rush. Gary paused at the far wall only long enough to collect the rest of their copper haul. Somewhere above them, Maurice was still berating his woman for smoking up whatever money was supposed to pay the water bill. Out in the rear alley at the far end of the block, Tony began laughing freely.

“Dag,” said Gary, his strongest expletive.

Smiling and shaking his head, he gripped some of the soon-to-bemelted copper in his outstretched hand like a royal scepter, holding it up in daylight for a proper examination.

“At least thirty.”

“Yeah, thirty,” Tony agreed.

Reality deferred. The joy of the caper allows that no matter what you snatch—copper pipe, tin roofing, aluminum screen doors—it’s always, at first glance, worth more than it actually is. Gary and Tony, at that moment, held up the pipe length and figured thirty dollars easy. Enough for two good blasts of dope and then coke to go on top. The sweet anticipation made the ten blocks to United Iron and Metal feel like a stroll through the yard.

“Tally ho,” said Gary, beaming.

But, of course, eighteen even was all they got at the United Iron scales—eighteen dollars that went directly to the young boy working the Death Row package. In return, two $10 glassine bags at a discount, all of it now in the pipeline.

Comfortable in his own patch of sunlight, Tony looks over at Gary and laughs softly.

“Got-damn,” says Tony.

Gary laughs back.

“Got-damn if she wasn’t right upstairs trying to turn the water on and we was down below.”

“And you was makin’ me laugh,” says Gary.

“Man, I couldn’t help it.”

Each true caper brings its own rush, a childlike thrill that stays close to the heart of every addict, no matter how many years he’s played the game. It’s the same feeling any hot-blooded twelve-year-old gets when he walks from a five-and-dime without paying for a candy bar, or when he tosses a crabapple at a passing police cruiser, gets chased by the cop, and manages to escape. It’s down there in every one of us—the unbridled joy that accompanies any unpunished sin, the self-satisfaction that often follows when you manage to get something for nothing.

“Man,” says Gary, finally. “That was wild.”

They laugh again, loudly at first, feeding on each other’s good humor, then softly for a time. Then they fall silent as the heroin rides over them.

Gary pulls down his hoody to scratch the top of his head. With both legs stretched in front of him, he feels the edge of his receding hairline and frowns. Every day he’s looking a little more like his father, which would be just fine if his father didn’t have more than thirty years on him. Gary wonders for a moment whether it’s heredity or drugging or both that is balding him out. Dope and coke have definitely changed him; this he knows. Every day, his skin seems to him a little darker and his eyes a bit more dusty, even when he isn’t riding a blast. The smile stays the same, of course. You can pick Gary out of a crowd a block away if he has that wide-mouthed beam working. And save for the tracks on his arms, his body, too, is about the same as he remembers it—compact, proportioned, athletic. Then again, Gary has been hardcore drugging for only four years; he can look across the room into Tony’s yellowed eyes and see the future. Tall and firm, Tony Boice is still a powerful man—Gary has seen him deliver an asskicking on more than one occasion—but now there is a little less flesh to the face, a little more shadow in the eyes. The more Gary looks at Tony, the more he is drawn to comparison. After all, both of them are wearing the same hooded sweatshirts and camouflage gear, looking like lost commandos on some doomed mission. It was Gary who had argued for the uniforms. We’re out here chasing capers every day, he reasoned; if we’re hardcore soldiering, we could do with some military styling.

But now, with the rush weakening, Gary takes a close look at Tony, then down at himself, then back at Tony. He feels a chill in the moment, as if something dread has slipped into this house. Gary tries to laugh again, but the noise gets caught in his throat. Instead, he’s left wondering whether the virus has caught Tony and thinned him out. Nowadays, The Bug is all over Fayette Street.

“Wassup?” asks Tony, looking at him.

“Huh?”

“What you wonderin’ at?”

Gary catches himself and straightens. He looks away from his partner, focusing for the first time on the empty room. “This was Andre’s,” he says finally. His son DeAndre’s room. Third floor rear, with the blue carpet and the southern exposure.

Slowly, Gary rises from the floor, stretches, and steps over Tony to look out the back window. His breath clouds a cracked pane as he stares down at the mounds of trash in the backyard. Clothes, grocery wrappers, Clorox bottles, broken furniture. If Gary had his way that yard would be fully enclosed in cement and Plexiglas, a private refuge with a patio and small lap pool. For a moment in Gary’s mind, it is just so: Fran and Gary and DeAndre together at poolside, living large, showing this tired old city a little something.

DeAndre. Where is he now? A block down on Fayette Street, maybe, in that shithole of a shooting gallery where his mother lays her head. Or more likely around the corner at Baltimore and Gilmor, slinging for one of the New Yorkers.

Gary silently curses himself for thinking these thoughts, for ruining his own hard-won high. Leaving Tony to nod, he steps from the window, looks around, and then walks back out into the hall. The staircase: so beautiful, his favorite part of the house. He wanders down to the second floor and the master bedroom, admiring the ornate trim along the top of the built-in armoire. All of it original. And the twelve-foot ceiling, too. Fran had loved the high ceilings most of all.

This used to be their bedroom, though it’s hard to see that now. The only bed remaining is a solitary mattress on the floor, covered by dirty linens. Milk crates stand in for furniture. A battered pine bureau sits in the corner with every drawer broken. A dozen pornographic pictures are taped to the four walls—every breast and crotch highlighted by crude circles and triangles drawn in thick black marker.

The art gallery was DeAndre’s contribution, still on display from the summer before, when Gary’s son turned fifteen and began slinging heroin on Gilmor Street. When his mother found out, Fran got so angry she put him out of the house. DeAndre stayed here for a while, and Gary did, too, using this place as a hideaway during his heroin binges. That summer, father and son would sometimes pass each other in these empty halls, both of them unable to manage any real connection. DeAndre was furious at his father’s descent, yet refused to part with any emotion. And Gary, though filled with real pride to see his firstborn becoming a manchild, could never risk words. Too much shame lurking there. Too much history.

Gary walks across the bedroom toward the front windows, trying to wrap his mind around some better thought. Two plastic milk crates filled with old record albums are stacked hard by one window—flotsam from that happier time. Gary leans forward, hands on both knees, scanning the remains of his collection. Marvin Gaye. Barry White. The Temptations. And, of course, Curtis Mayfield, who used to mean everything to Gary. Curtis, always speaking for sanity, warning that if there’s hell below, we’re all going to go. Gary pulls out an album, looks at it, then returns it carefully to the crate.

Ancient history here, too; vinyl sound-of-soul relics gathering dust in the age of hip-hop rhythm kings and gangsta posers. Gary has no ear for what the younguns call music nowadays.

He sings.

“If you had a choice of colors …”

A beautiful voice. A strong tenor for any church choir.

“… which one would you choose, my brothers.”

The sound echoes through the house. Gary hears Tony stirring a floor above him. Gary starts another couplet, but the moment is broken by a tumult below the front windows. The lyric is lost amid angry cursing.

“On the ground! On the ground, motherfucker!”

Gary creeps to the right window, peering around the edge of the dirty sheet that passes for a curtain.

“Get your hand out of your pocket. You hear me? Get your hand out of your pocket.”

Plainclothesmen. Knockers. Six police jump out of two unmarked Chevrolets and shove two men to the sidewalk right below Gary’s window.

“What?” asks Tony from the doorway.

“Shsshhhh,” Gary hisses. “Poh-leece.”

“Who is it?”

Gary shakes his head.

“Bob Brown?”

Bob Brown is the predominant constabulary scourge of every doper in the Franklin Square neighborhood—fiends in this part of town invoke the name as something distinct from the rest of the Baltimore Police Department. Whenever he makes an entrance, lookouts actually shout “Bob Brown,” rather than the generic “Five-Oh” or “Time Out.”

Gary shakes his head. Not Mr. Brown, not this time. “Knockers,” he whispers. “I don’t know none of ’em.”

Tony steps softly toward the edge of the other window and looks down at the encounter. These police aren’t regulars in the neighborhood, and the two on the ground aren’t familiar faces either. Both are on their backs; one on the sidewalk, the other in the dirt where the pavement breaks at the base of a small tree. Both are pleading innocence. Three of the plain-clothesmen stand over them, shouting; a fourth stands in the street, eyefucking the crews on the Mount Street corners. The other two are waiting next to the unmarked Chevrolets, both cars idling in the fast lane of Fayette Street, the front and rear doors splayed open.

“Don’t fucking lie to me!”

“No, we just …”

“Motherfucker, get your pants down.”

Gary and Tony stand silently at the windows, watching the scene play out. A white police is doing the shouting; two black companions poke through jacket pockets. The young man in the dirt is still trying to argue the case, but his partner has already gone cold, his hardest game face now showing only hate. Slowly, still on their backs, the two lower their pants to their knees, their exposed legs shaking in the winter air. A police picks at the waistbands of their boxers, looking south. Dickie checks in ten-degree weather, but there’s no dope down there in those Jockeys or anywhere else for that matter. On the sidewalk is the brown sandwich bag one man was carrying. A knocker picks it up, looks inside and then, satisfied, drops it back on the pavement.

The white police checks the sidewalk farther down Fayette Street, looking for loose paper or vials.

“I didn’t see anything get thrown,” a black police says. A subtle suggestion, perhaps; one cop trying to tell another that, hey, maybe he got this one wrong.

“Man, I swear we clean,” says the man in the dirt.

“Shut up,” says the white police.

But the sidewalk search yields nothing. After a moment or two more, with the wind whipping trash and dead leaves down Fayette Street, the young man in the dirt looks up at the black police and risks another plea.

“Man, can we put our pants on?”

The cop gives a quick, cursory nod and both men hoist themselves up on their elbows, undulating like crabs on the sidewalk as they work to dress themselves.

The white plainclothesman tires of the game. He walks back toward one of the idling Chevrolets, turning to shout a final line at the two men on the ground. Dope or no dope, there’s always a moral to the story.

“Don’t let me see your ass out here again.”

Then they’re gone, the Chevrolets roaring up Fayette Street toward some new encounter. With every tout and dealer watching from the Mount Street corners, the two young men slowly gather up their humiliation and step off.

Gary and Tony are still right above them in the window, bearing witness with no small amazement. Across the street, the Death Row and Diamond in the Raw crews immediately reopen the Mount Street shop.

“Man, I can’t believe that,” Gary says, shaking his head in disgust. “They were just coming out of the carryout. The one boy had a sandwich is all.”

Tony snorts in agreement.

“I can’t believe it,” Gary says again. Twenty people standing out there at Mount and Fayette Streets—all of them selling or buying drugs, half of them dirty with the shit—and the knockers are jumping out and messing with two dopeless niggers and a meatball sub. Undressing them in the street, telling them they can’t be out here, then driving off to do the same to someone else.

“Like they did to me last year,” says Gary. “Knocked out my teeth over a corn chip. And then afterward telling me I can’t stand on the street where I live.”

Gary shakes his head slowly, but without any real sense of indignation. The shit just happens out here nowadays; it doesn’t have to make sense. Out here, any fiend can tell you, the rule of thumb is that the less sense something makes, the more people run to it. The dealers, the touts, the users, the knockers—all of them are out here every day and every night, pretending to play this game like it can be won or lost, like the game has rules even. But it’s somehow beyond all that; from the inside looking out, it’s obvious to Gary that every last rule will be broken. His breath clouds a windowpane as he watches the Death Row tout begin taking new orders, sending two white boys around the corner toward the alley on Mount. Then Gary’s eyes fix on a new sight.

“Dag,” he says, and with good reason, for coming up the hill from Gilmor is the Gaunt One herself, the skin-and-bone harbinger of all that Gary loves and fears in this neighborhood.

“Ronnie,” he says.

Veronica Boice, Tony’s cousin and Gary’s onagain-off-again girl, is walking up Fayette Street in a slow glide. Her eyes dart from corner to corner, her wide mouth curls at one end in bemused confidence. It’s Ronnie on the prowl.

Feeling vulnerable, Gary steps back from the window and begins charting out a potential disaster, burning out his high in the process. A frantic computation clicks through his brain: Ronnie catches me and Tony up here; Ronnie figures we had a caper; Ronnie knows we did the blast without her; Ronnie makes me pay.

When the issue is thirty on the hype, hell hath no fury like Ronnie Boice. Like that time last year, when Gary cut Ronnie out of a blast and she actually called the police on him, made him take a domestic assault charge that was still hovering over him, floating around the city court system somewhere. Or the time before that, when Ronnie burned some Jamaicans for a stash and then put the thing on Gary, who was completely baffled when a six-pack of wild-eyed Jakes kicked in his door and demanded repayment. And Ronnie—all ninety pounds of her—managed to create such mayhem with only her mind and her mouth. On these corners, she was a force of nature, and Gary, though he had every reason to fear her, could never manage to get past his awe. Ronnie would burn him time and again; she would water his drugs and switch his syringe. She would tell him she loved him even as she was putting him in harm’s way. Eventually, if he wasn’t careful—and Gary wasn’t careful—Ronnie would get him dead. But the woman could make money out of nothing. For that reason alone, Gary stayed with her.

But he does not want to see her now. Definitely not now.

Gary motions to Tony, and one behind the other, they lurch down the stairs to the first floor. In the hallway, Gary catching a glimpse of a luminous stretch of canvas on the wall. Commissioned by Gary and painted by his friend Blue, the work pictured an ancient rune that Gary had chosen from a cosmology book, a life-force symbol that he took as the logo for Lightlaw, his home development company. Another time, another life.

They pass through the wrecked kitchen, then down a half flight of stairs into a narrow corridor of unfinished basement. They make their way toward the rear, where a sliver of light is visible from the other side of a rotting wooden barrier. Tony opens the door and sunlight streams through the portal. Like true commandos in their camouflage gear, they stride out the door and through the trashed rear alley, hunching into the wind.

“Where you headed?” asks Gary.

“Up the way. You gonna see Ronnie?”

Gary nods. He’ll run up to Fulton, then come back down Fayette and catch Ronnie from the other direction. Make it seem like he just rolled out of bed at his mother’s house. Ask Ronnie if she’s got her hooks into any kind of caper—something that’ll get him over—all the while hoping she won’t see the dust in his eyes.

“Well, okay, you’ll see what’s up,” says Tony.

“Awright, Mo,” says Gary. “I’ll be back to you.”

“Awright then.”

Tony heads south toward Baltimore Street, and Gary turns right, taking the long way back onto Fayette. Ronnie is still downslope at Mount Street, still scoping the corners for opportunity. Finally she sees Gary, and lets go of a smile so knowing and lethal that even in ten degrees, Gary can feel a separate chill down his spine. She knows.

“Hey, love,” she says, looking hard into his eyes.

“Hey,” he says.

“How you doing?”

“Awright,” Gary mumbles.

“How you feeling?”

“Okay.”

“Mmm hmm,” says Ronnie Boice.

She knows. Dag, she always knows.

DeAndre McCullough wakes to the morning cold fully dressed and still weary from the night before. Slowly, he rolls sideways on the narrow mattress, leaving a worn blanket in the center trough where the springs have all but collapsed. He lets one arm fall over the higher edge of the bed and slowly opens one eye. Below and to the right of him on the baseboard, he catches the brown sheen of a cockroach and reaches under the bed. He comes up with his one of his mother’s shoes, firing it against the wall, missing by inches. The roach scurries off.

DeAndre closes his eyes, trying to regain sleep, but the noise from the old Zenith, which runs nonstop in this back bedroom, has grabbed his attention. He buries his face in the mattress, but he can’t help listening.

“Boy,” he mutters with contempt, sensing his younger brother at the foot of the bed. “You watch some stupid shit.”

DeRodd shrugs. “It was on when I got up.”

“That don’t mean you got to watch it.”

DeRodd says nothing. The dinosaur starts into his dinosaur song and DeAndre raises his head just high enough to glare at his brother.

“Barney ain’t shit,” he says finally.

“I’m not watching,” DeRodd insists.

“Off-brand, purple-ass dinosaur,” mutters DeAndre, swinging an open palm at the younger boy’s head.

“Ow,” says DeRodd softly.

DeAndre raises his legs slowly and drops first one, then the other over the edge of the mattress until he’s finally sitting up, rubbing both eyes with his hands. He can remember staggering up here about two in the morning with a cheesesteak from Bill’s; the wrapper is on the floor in front of him. He can remember that he had a good day down on Fairmount yesterday; money in his pocket and Boo owing him still more for the vials DeAndre fronted him. He can remember getting blunted up with Tae and Sean. In fact, he can remember pretty much everything; that business about weed making you forget things is all bullshit.

“Why ain’t you in school?” DeAndre asks.

“Saturday.”

DeAndre grunts. A good enough answer, but it’s not in him to give any eight-year-old the last word.

“You should go anyway.”

“Ain’t no school on Saturday.”

“You should go there and wait for Monday.”

DeRodd pouts and DeAndre swings again with an open hand. This time the younger boy is ready and ducks away.

“Where Ma at?” asks DeAndre.

DeRodd shrugs.

Stretching slowly, DeAndre rises and catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror above the dresser. The forest of short dreds that top his head Bart Simpson-style is crushed to one side by the night’s sleep; in profile, he looks like a coal black rooster. His hair is his most distinct ive feature, a detail that declares him unique in a neighborhood where image is everything.

Otherwise, he is a study in urban conformity, and within minutes, he is primed and dressed to match the set: a black puff ski parka left open to flap in the breeze, a thick blue and white flannel shirt worn outside oversized jeans that ride low on the hips, the requisite high-top Nikes that go for upwards of $125 a pair.

Running down the steps from the second floor, he digs one hand into the front pocket of his denims, pulling out a tight roll of twenties, tens, and fives. He pauses in the empty vestibule to count it off; four hundred twenty-five and some change, and for once it’s all there. Not like last weekend when he and the boys brought some girls to the vacant house up the block on Fayette. They smoked like ten bags of weed, and the next morning, DeAndre woke alone and hurting in his parents’ old bedroom, his gallery of pinups mocking him from all sides. When he checked his pocket that morning, it wasn’t seven hundred, but about three-forty on the roll. And DeAndre for the life of him couldn’t remember where it went. Weed? Girls? Or maybe someone waited for him to fall out on the mattress and then dipped into the bank.

He had slept in today. By the time he gets down the block and around the corner, it’s afternoon and the fiends—white boys coming north from Pigtown, those of his own hue rolling down the hill from Monroe Street—have collected into a loose, shifting crowd around the corner of Baltimore and Gilmor. Moving down the litter-blown block, he looks older than his fifteen years, outwardly confident in a way that teenagers seldom are. The wayward hairstyle is recognizable a block away, the clothes tailored to this season’s G-thang look, but nothing carries enough flash to attract unnecessary attention. No gold on the neck or hands to catch the winter sun—nothing that glimmers enough to attract stickup boys or that a knocker might take for cheap probable cause. By and large, the McCullough boy is a study in a lower key.

Arriving at the alley entrance to Fairmount, he takes stock of his real estate. This is mine, he thinks, watching the touts work the crowd. I made it happen. Ain’t no kid stuff, like that bullshit last summer when his crew tried their hand at slinging only to get plucked bad by the big boys.

For two years now, DeAndre and the others—Tae and R.C., Boo and Manny Man, Dinky and Brian and the rest—have been carrying themselves like a gang, calling themselves C.M.B. for Crenshaw Mafia Brothers, a name agreed upon after the fourth or fifth viewing of Boyz in the Hood at Harbor Park. So far, C.M.B. was something of a rump creation, sandwiched between the more established Edmondson Avenue Boys to the north and the Ramsay and Stricker crew down bottom. More lethal than all of them is the crew from the high-rise projects to the east. A five-tower nightmare at the western edge of the city’s downtown, Lexington Terrace has so many buildings from which to draw members that the Terrace Boys are always deep. Still, the C.M.B. contingent had Fayette Street to itself, and ever since they turned twelve and thirteen, the boys had been playing at gangster. Two years ago, that meant mostly street fights and dotting brick walls and asphalt with Crenshaw Mafia tags. Last summer, they stepped up a bit, stealing cars one after another for the joy of it or sneaking down to the Pulaski corners to try their hand at drug slinging. In any other world, it would be called criminal; on Fayette Street, it still amounted to casual misadventure. At Hollins and Pulaski, C.M.B.’ s initial foray on a corner ended comically enough, when their supplier waited until the summer’s last re-up, then disappeared on them with all their pooled profits.

Tae, R.C., and the others were still moaning about it, but DeAndre, at least, had been spared that disaster. Instead, he had spent the last half of the summer under the wing of a New Yorker, Bugsy by name, who saw promise in DeAndre and set him up with a sixty-forty split on packages of blue-topped coke vials. Working on consignment, DeAndre and a handful of others had gone big-time, opening up the old strip where the 1500 block of Fairmount Avenue runs into Gilmor.

Fairmount had been dead most of the last year, when Stashfinder and the other knockers hit it hard, chasing the action back up to Mount and Fayette, or down to the lower end by Baltimore and Stricker, leaving Fairmount to the ghosts. But it was still prime territory. Tiny Fairmount, a two-block alley street of rowhouses teeing into Gilmor, offered darkness and a warren run of side alleys and walkways. A tactical night mare for the knockers, it was ideal terrain for a young dealer working a ground stash. Of course, it was also a nice setup for the stickup boys, so that the likes of Odell or Shorty Boyd could jump on a whole crew, lining them up and taking every damn thing. But DeAndre would carry that; getting jacked now and again was, after all, a part of the game.

Fairmount had been slow going at first. He had to get the word out, draw the fiends in to sample his product. He and his cousin’s boyfriend, Corey, spent a lot of time out on the corner, working hard to get the shop up and running. The knockers had mostly moved on to other hot spots, but the stickup boys were a bitch, feeding in a frenzy once they discovered the new market. He got jacked once, and he lost a ground stash or two, but by and large, most of the profit was realized. In August, he got caught by a couple knockers with a handful of pills, but no matter—DeAndre played that, too, to his advantage, showing Bugsy the juvenile court papers and telling the dealer he got nailed with the whole bundle. Bugsy took it off the account; DeAndre then emptied the blue-tops into pinks and sold off pure profit behind his supplier’s back.

Until his big setback, it was a fine summer. And when his number came up, it was the result of neither a Western District patrolman’s vigilance, nor the business end of a stickup boy’s nine millimeter. Ultimately, DeAndre McCullough fell at the hands of his own mother. Fran copped his stash.

There is precious little privacy on Fayette Street, which is a problem for a young corner boy looking to hide inventory. Try to be invisible around here, try to tiptoe into a vacant house, and someone is always watching, clocking your moves, hoping you slip. Leave a ground stash unattended and Little Kenny or Hungry or Charlene will be quick to carry it off. Trust a tout like Country or Tyrone and your package will be nothing but memory. Rent an apartment from one of the regular stash-house girls and you better pay someone to sit in there or the bitch will blow profit up her nose and lie about it later. For DeAndre, the possibilities are limited to a single option: his mother’s room. It’s not much, but Fran Boyd is lucky to have that: one rear bedroom at what the Fayette Street fiends like to call the Dew Drop Inn, the closest thing to a shooting gallery east of Blue’s.

The three-story rowhouse in the 1600 block of West Fayette is the last stop for all the Boyds, save Fran’s older brother, Scoogie, who got their grandmother’s house up on Saratoga. For the two upper floors of 1625, Fran’s sister, Bunchie, pays thirty-two dollars a month under a federal Section 8 housing reimbursement. She, in turn, pushes that weight off onto three siblings—Fran, Stevie, and Sherry—charging each fifty a month for a bedroom. For Fran and her two sons, home is the second-floor rear room, all eight-by-ten feet of it.

They share a cluttered cubicle coated with the acrid tang of Newports and crammed with a single bed, a battered dresser, two chairs that are oozing their stuffing and, of course, the sleepless television. The bed usually goes to DeRodd and DeAndre, with Fran making do on the old sofa in the front room. Some nights, though, the bed mattress is taken by Fran and DeRodd, with DeAndre in a bedroll on the floor. Other times, it’s Fran on the bedroll, giving her sons the better chance at a night’s sleep. On the worst of nights—weekends or check days, perhaps, when pipers and gunners are ranging ceaselessly through the second-floor apartment—it’s all three of them together, fighting for a thin sliver of the single mattress as myriad forms of human dysfunction take place just outside the bedroom door.

Beyond the bare necessities, the back room features little else: an overstuffed closet; a makeshift nightstand on a milk crate, where Fran can chase her lines if the basement is otherwise occupied; a couple of Polaroid shots pinned to the walls, hinting at some better time; a funeral home pamphlet from the service for Fran’s mother last year. This is the space that DeAndre can pretend to control, and it’s therefore where his stash has to go.

Not that it had always been so. Early last fall, DeAndre thought he had it made when Fran, angry at his drug slinging, put him out of the Dew Drop. Summarily evicted from 1625, DeAndre went immediately up the block to 1717 Fayette, where his father was haunting what was left of the old house. Gary gave up the master bedroom and DeAndre suddenly found himself in a teenager’s dream, a paradise of unencumbered real estate that he was quick to turn into his clubhouse, decorating the walls with raw centerfolds, smoking blunts and downing forties with the other C.M.B. boys, and generally doing as he damn well pleased at the ripened age of fifteen. Yeah boy.

There was a downside. The plumbing didn’t exist and the electric was shut off, which made for some chilly nights. Not much in the way of furnishings either. And then there were the house guests, if you could call them that. For some months, Gary McCullough had been shuttling between 1717 Fayette and his mother’s house on Vine, staying the cold nights in his mother’s basement, but running the remnant of his former home as a kind of low-bottom rooming house. Trouble was, Gary, being a fiend, couldn’t afford to offer any of the usual amenities, and his boarders, being fiends, couldn’t afford to pay rent. Nor was anyone inclined to leave.

There was some young white girl from the county on the run for bad checks; with her was her dark-skinned boyfriend, who fed off her and occasionally touted for Diamond in the Raw. They shared the third floor with an older woman who haunted the Baltimore Street strip, trading her body for shot money. On the second floor was Arthur, a stone psycho whose room was closest to the front. Having supped heavily on the gore of Harbor Park slasher movies, DeAndre had no illusions about Crazy Arthur, not after he accidentally on purpose stuck his head into Arthur’s room one morning to find a stained mattress, a green garbage bag leaking moldy clothes, and a forest of glass bottles in all shapes and sizes, hundreds of them, some capped and some open but all of them filled to the brim with piss. Before that day’s night, DeAndre had rigged the connecting walkway with an assortment of boards, bits of fencing, strips of metal, and a tangle of rope—all of it woven into a kind of homemade tripwire to discourage Arthur from any midnight stroll toward the front bedroom.

Instead, the real peril at 1717 Fayette turned out to be his father. No matter how carefully DeAndre hid his stash, Gary found a way to the vials. His father didn’t skim a whole lot at first, but it was enough eventually to cut through DeAndre’s margins and enough finally to drive him back down the street to Fran and that godforsaken second-floor room.

Since moving back with his mother before Thanksgiving, DeAndre had been working Fairmount from package to package, more part-time than in the summer, but still enough to keep the roll fat. For a fifteen-year-old, the corner was not yet a job, and DeAndre, for all his pretense, could play at gangster for only as long as it took to get spending money. When he wanted to work, he and Corey would go to Bugsy or some other connect for a G-pack or a New York Quarter. Then they’d sell off. Then they’d play.

Short of the occasional juvenile charge or stickup, DeAndre had life pretty much the way he wanted it, provided there was a place on this earth where he could keep a stash. At the old house, it was his father helping himself to a few vials here, a few there. At the Dew Drop, it was cat-and-mouse with his mother. In December, when no one was around to watch, DeAndre did the only thing he could think to do: he hid the coke, the cash, and the .38 that Bugsy had given him for muscle in the closet, inside the sleeve of a leather jacket, which he then stuffed deep in a mass of balled-up laundry.

There wasn’t any better choice. Uncle Stevie’s room next door was more a shooting gallery than a bedroom, with Stevie, a certified welder, now torching nothing larger than a bottle cap. Same with upstairs, where Aunt Bunchie and Alfred and Aunt Sherry and her man, Kenny, were keeping house. Sherry might not be a worry; she was a drinker more than anything, but the other three were hardened players who wouldn’t hesitate to move on him. As for the second-floor living room, that was also out of the question. Too much foot traffic and besides, little Ray Ray was now sleeping there, hitched to a cardiac monitor because Aunt Sherry’s last baby was a crib death. You never knew when someone might come stumbling past to check on Ray Ray.

So it was the closet and hope for the best. But Fran was bolder than Gary, and it wasn’t a week before DeAndre walked into the rear bedroom and sensed disaster the minute he caught sight of the leather jacket lying cold and lonely on the bed.

Damn. He raced out of the room, down the stairs and into the basement, where he found Fran and Bunchie. Two cats who had swallowed the canary.

“Where my stuff?”

Just seeing them sitting there together in the basement was answer enough.

“DeAndre, you got to be joking, leaving that shit in there. Suppose DeRodd found it.” Fran played it easy, holding in her fangs.

“Where my stuff?” he persisted.

“Where you think?”

“I ain’t joking. That’s not my shit.”

“I don’t care. It’s gone.”

“Then you’re gonna pay.”

“You threatening me?” Her anger began to show.

DeAndre turned away. “That’s all right. It ain’t on me. It’s Bugsy’s shit.”

He was determined not to let it drop. He knew his mother, and if he had any hope of using that room in the future he had to let her know how far he was willing to go.

“So what you saying? You gonna tell him?” she exploded. “You little shit. You gonna tell him? I’ll tell him. Tell him about using a minor to sell drugs. Tell him about going to jail. DeAndre you must be joking.”

“Yeah,” he said, stalking out. “We’ll see.”

Two days later, Bugsy showed up on the front steps asking for Fran. Scared her, too, it seemed to DeAndre. Scared her enough to get the.38 back and keep her from his stash.

So now, with the turn of a new year, the stash problem seems settled and things seem to be working as if by plan. Half of the Fayette Street regulars are rolling down the hill to little old Fairmount, looking for blue tops, looking for DeAndre. The white boys, too, are scurrying across the DMZ from South Baltimore, ducking Bob Brown and his puppies, coming north for better vials. And young DeAndre McCullough is carrying it like he’s King of the Strip.

“Got them Blues.”

“Got the Ready Rock.”

“Blues. Right here for them Blue Tops.”

All along Fairmount and Gilmor, brand-name recognition rings in the night air. DeAndre’s got a bomb and the fiends know it. He’s moving two, sometimes three G-packs a night with the lion’s share going to Bugsy, but still he’s pulling in six, maybe seven or eight hundred on a good night, less the spillage and expenses. He was here yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that. And today he’s back at it again, waiting on one of the Fairmount stoops for the next customer, taking stock of his position. He checks in with Boo, who’s been working for him this last week, moving half a pack for DeAndre as a sixty-forty subcontractor.

“How many from what I gave you last night?”

Boo counts in his head.

“How many from the fifty?”

Boo is lost in the math. Twelve, he guesses.

“Twelve?”

“Um.”

If you want a job done right, DeAndre thinks, you got to work alone. Oblivious to the bite of the winter wind, he settles in to mind shop, working through the afternoon and into the early dark. Eyes darting, he’s alert to the flow of the street.

A minute or two more and his attention focuses on a shadow that jerks its way up Gilmor. A white boy, a reed-thin piper, creeping his way north. The stick man hesitates and half turns back to Baltimore Street, then turns once more toward Fairmount. DeAndre stands, revealing himself. Stepping off the stoop, he gives a slight wave before moving around the corner into the darkness of Fairmount Avenue. The piper locks onto the motion and stumbles forward on the new vector. DeAndre leads down Fairmount to the lip of a side alley, away from the crowd on Gilmor.

“What up,” DeAndre asks, voice neutral.

No sales pitch. No need.

The stick man bends into DeAndre, a supplicant extending a small wad of bills. DeAndre takes the offering and steps into the middle of the street to catch a bit of the street lamp on Gilmor. Slowly he smooths the money and makes the count. Satisfied, he pockets it, and without a word, he’s down the alley. The stick figure presses against a brick wall, seeking protection from the wind, no doubt worried that the black kid is gone with the dollars.

But DeAndre is straight up. He won’t shake the vial or cut the product. He’s not greedy that way. Wired and twitching, the stick man gets served and slips offstage quickly, bolting around the corner and southward. He’s a charged particle loosed beyond the human condition, frenzied, spinning through the streets from one vial to the next. Those on the pipe are so coke-crazed, so hungry for that ready rock that even hardcore dope fiends are apt to show disgust. A man can carry an addiction to heroin, or at least he can pretend to carry it; cocaine always carries the man.

The sale registered, DeAndre returns to his stoop, waiting in the night’s cold for the next customer and the next after that. He’s a player here. On this small corner, at least, he’s the shit.

When things are going bad, the question for DeAndre McCullough is always, where in hell is the money going to come from? But when things are going good, it’s exactly the opposite: Where do the money go? Nike high-tops. Timberlands. Tommy Hilfigers and Filas. Weed from the E.A.B. crew up on Edmondson. Quarter-pounders and Happy Meals from McDonald’s. Cheesesteaks from Bill’s. Movies downtown at Harbor Park with one of the neighborhood girls. Video games on Baltimore Street. As fast as he makes his money, he spends it—and the more money he makes, the more shit he manages to buy. Like now, with so much cash coming at him from Fairmount Avenue, he can’t even get mad on waking to find half his roll missing; he’d make that back again in an hour or two. Even DeAndre has to admit that it’s too much wealth for any fifteen-year-old to handle. He’s fucking up and can hardly bring himself to worry it.

And it’s all so damn easy. He could walk off this corner now and have money enough to carry him through a week or two. Come back with another package and he’d be flush again in a day. With the right connect and a little bit of rep, there isn’t anything so right as the corner. Time and again, he would finish a run with a nice, fat roll and tell himself that he was done, that he would go back to school and maybe get a straight job and be satisfied with a little less adventure, a little less pocket money. Then he would spend, and spend some more, until the only way he could right himself was to get back on Fairmount. Compared to that, the school-work meant nothing, and a minimum-wage job even less. Still, there was something inside that made DeAndre hold back, something that kept him from declaring once and for all that the corner would be his place in the world. In the back of his mind, he told himself that he hadn’t yet made a choice. He was fifteen; a distribution charge still meant nothing worse than a juvenile petition. And he was smart—all his teachers said so—and still on the rollbook at Francis M. Woods. He could bear down, get some class time, maybe make the tenth grade with a social promotion. He could play at this corner, but step off when it was time. And DeAndre trusted himself; he would know when it was time.

The night before, in fact, the knockers rolled past on him on Fairmount. No big thing. It wasn’t like he was dirty when they came through, but he got a good once-over from Collins. And he knew Collins wanted to beat on him; he would have beat on him that one time if Fran hadn’t been around to stop it. The roll-past gave DeAndre something to think about, and he’s thinking about it still. It isn’t so much a question of fear; DeAndre is grown enough to take either a charge or a legal ass-whipping if need be. But still, last night seems like warning enough. He’s poor no more; he’s got all the Tims and Nikes and designer wear he needs. And Fairmount is up and running; it will be here for him whenever he’s ready to move back into the mix. Now might be the time to step off, before Collins and the rest get their chance. Now might be the time to go see Miss Davis and make sure he’s still on the class rolls.

Sitting on the stoop, DeAndre decides that this is his last night on Fairmount. He works his package down that evening, and the next morning, he does his laundry in the tub. Dressed in still damp clothes, he heads down Fayette Street past the Fairmount corner and two blocks farther to Francis M. Woods Senior High School, the only school in Baltimore that would consider for more than a second the idea of enrolling DeAndre McCullough. Chin to chest, eyes cast down, he is deep inside himself as he walks stiff-legged, driving his heels mechanically into the pavement.

He climbs the school steps like he belongs, trying several of the front doors. All locked. He rings the buzzer, content to wait. He’s spent an inordinate amount of time on the wrong side of a locked school door, in most cases accompanied by his mother, waiting for the authorities to reach a decision, waiting to start again. Standing here today in the January cold, he stares indifferently into the lens of the security camera. Finally, he hears the buzz of the door release and snatches the handle.

Inside, he’s greeted by Gould, the school security officer.

“Good to have you back, brother.”

DeAndre smiles sheepishly, then enters the front office to wait for Miss Davis. He’s sure she will claim him, his confidence secured, at least for this moment, by his newfound resolve to attend class and do the work. For his part, he’s willing to let bygones be bygones, and he’s hoping the assistant principal sees it the same way.

Rose Davis has created a haven at Francis M. Woods for those rebellious, damaged spirits shipwrecked and abandoned by the rest of the city school system. She is everywhere at Francis Woods: a calming influence, encouraging and chiding, trying to get her charges to realize some of their potential, or at least some of their value, fighting what amounts to an endless rearguard action against the corner itself. She makes it her business to travel the local markets, where she sees many of her students and former students hanging. She’s seen DeAndre on Fairmount; she knows what that’s about.

He sits there in the office, wrapped in an unlikely innocence, waiting to be given yet another chance, accustomed to this moment of feigned redemption. DeAndre is forever in a school’s administrative office, forever waiting to talk to an administrator. His academic standard is defined by a long streak of second-day suspensions, allowing him the opportunity to attend the first day of every semester, showing off new outfits and high-tops, fronting for the girls. Once all joy is squeezed from that first day, DeAndre follows up by quickly scuttling the academics with a disciplinary suspension of no less than two weeks, or with any luck at all, a month or more. His friends’ school disciplinary sheets aren’t shabby, but DeAndre always manages to go them one better. For all of them, school is something to endure until the age of fifteen and a half; the law says sixteen, but the children of Fayette Street have the juvenile court backlog figured into the equation. Within that framework, most learn to at least go through the motions. A few of the C.M.B. regulars—R.C., Dorian, or Brooks—don’t bother showing up, preferring to take their chances with the juvenile system. But the rest manage, with some regularity, to take a seat in classrooms that seem to them entirely disconnected from the facts of their world.

For DeAndre, there is no common ground with anything resembling authority, and his juvenile sheet chronicles a constant struggle to stand true to himself regardless of the damage done. DeAndre McCullough doesn’t bend and he doesn’t forgive and he never forgets. In the classroom, he flies the flag of piracy and insolence. He is about struggle.

In nursery school, he had words with a little girl and ended up crowning her with a chair. That was the first suspension. In the second and fourth grades, he fought with his teachers, taking charges for assault and more suspensions. In the fifth grade, he was asked to leave three separate schools. In the seventh grade, he failed to embrace an antidrug presentation at the school and joined the select few who can claim a charge of punching an armed Baltimore City police officer during classroom hours.

It’s not as if school officials weren’t aware of the challenge. They caught on to DeAndre early and sent him, at age ten, to a big brother program, hoping a role model would have a positive influence. It didn’t take, but still they moved him along. He’s too smart to be held back, they would tell Fran, who learned to anticipate that on the second day of any given semester, she could expect an invitation to meet with some vice principal at some school somewhere in the city.

But things seemed to change last September, when DeAndre came to Francis Woods and the enlightened administration of Miss Rose Davis. Fresh from his wild summer on Fairmount, DeAndre arrived at school in high spirits, and come the second day of classes, he stayed put. He was there the third day, as well. And the fourth. His mother began to believe that her son had turned a corner.

What she didn’t know about this sudden commitment to academics was its origin, which had to do with a hot weekend night that summer, when the boys of C.M.B. got deep and decided to take a walk into South Baltimore, down to Ramsay Street in search of a rumored house party. They found it, but they weren’t exactly welcomed—at least not by the Stricker and Ramsay crew, who sensed a territorial violation. Eyes glaring, the two groups managed for a time to keep their distance, but when you’re traveling with the likes of Boo and Dorian, trouble is assured. Words got tossed, then fists, until a full-blown brawl tumbled outside. C.M.B. held its own; DeAndre and R.C. were doing most of the damage until one of the Stricker and Ramsay boys—Sherman Smith, by name—tilted the table and came out with his iron. A couple of misspent shots and C.M.B. was on the run.

It wasn’t anything special. They’d had their share of shooting and being shot at and were usually content to laugh it off in the safety of Tae’s basement or the rec center playground, R.C. often taking the lead in editing the encounter: “Yo, we was fucking them up. Yo, did you see DeAndre hit that motherfucker? Yo, he dropped him.”

That they got run off, that they were fighting tame when the other side had their guns out didn’t matter. In R.C.’ s version, victory would always be assured.

But on that occasion, R.C.’ s revisionism wasn’t enough for DeAndre, who crept back home to get his .380 semi, a weary thing that could have used a little more care. Creeping back down in the bottom that same night, DeAndre spotted Sherman near McHenry Street and let one fly, but missed. Sherman returned fire and a rolling gun battle ensued, at least until DeAndre’s gun fell apart, the clip hitting the ground, the bullets spilling onto the pavement.

Aw shit. He tried frantically to stuff the bullets into the clip, but Sherman, sensing weakness, pressed the attack and sent DeAndre scurrying back up top. Safe on the other side of Baltimore Street, his body soaked in sweat, DeAndre vowed revenge. And true to that purpose, he spent the rest of the summer hunting Sherman from Westside to Mt. Claire, but the boy was nowhere to be found.

Until September, when on that first day of class, during the home room roll call, DeAndre caught the sound of two magic words: “Sherman Smith.”

Yeah boy. Brightening, he scanned the room.

“… Sherman Smith …”

No response. Marked absent.

DeAndre left school that day inspired. Of all the schools and of all the classes, fate chose to put Sherman in the same blessed room. All he had to do was wait him out, and for that, DeAndre was in school the next day and the day after that and for as long as it took, all the time praying that Sherman wasn’t locked up, or doing so well on some corner that he wouldn’t ever come to class. As the September days ran one to the next, his resolve never wavered. Every morning he was up and out, attending each of his first three classes, then maybe cutting out only when he was convinced Sherman was a no-show.

He even asked his mother to help him get up in the mornings. Fran responded initially with suspicion, but after a week or so, DeAndre could see she was impressed at his effort.

Two weeks into the semester, DeAndre was in a third-floor hallway when he focused on the vision that was Sherman, bending over to open a metal locker.

“Yeah boy!”

DeAndre dropped his binder and charged. Sherman had a second to straighten up before DeAndre crashed into him, sending both boys sprawling across the floor. DeAndre was on top quickly, raining fists as Sherman balled up like a possum.

Later in her office, Rose Davis let loose on both DeAndre and Sherman, ordering them to come back the next day with a parent. DeAndre left first and quickly found R.C., who was hanging on Fulton Avenue with Dorian.

“Look at these,” he declared, raising his swollen hands with pride. “Fucked that boy up.”

“DeAndre, you a crazy nigger, yo,” R.C. assured him.

Then it was off to tell Fran, who listened to the whole story and gave back only a cold look of disappointment. Watching her, DeAndre actually felt bad for the first time and found himself promising to continue with school if Fran would go and talk with Miss Davis.

“Andre, you got to be joking,” she told him.

But the next day, Fran went with her son to see Rose Davis, who greeted Fran warmly and ushered her into her office. As long as DeAndre could remember, Fran had always attended these meetings and, regardless of her own problems, had always managed to wear her concern into the room.

“You can come in, too,” added Rose, her eyebrows raised. DeAndre had settled in on the couch in the outer office. “There are no secrets here.”

True to form, Rose had spent part of the previous day tapping into her considerable sources, pinning down the details of the McCullough-Smith feud. With the three of them seated in her office, she let a long silence undermine DeAndre’s confidence, staring at him until he dropped his head and began to fidget. She related to Fran her son’s history with Sherman.

Damn, thought DeAndre. Who snitching?

“Well, DeAndre,” Rose said, turning her attention to him, “your attendance has certainly improved from last year.”

He was out of his depth and he knew it, hiding behind a mumbled, “Yes’m.”

“So now that you’ve settled your little score, I guess we won’t be seeing very much of you around here anymore.”

“No, I’m going to go,” he insisted. “I’m going to go.”

“Well, let’s just write that down.”

She handed him her little account book, the repository for so many handwritten promises, all duly signed. Some were kept, most were forgotten, but all were used to try to bind her students to her, to put it on a personal level.

DeAndre had signed that promise, but as the fall days grew shorter, he felt the ache of his poverty, the desolation of the rear bedroom on Fayette Street and the lure of the nightly action. Slowly, inexorably, he slipped off to Fairmount Avenue.

Now he’s back. And of course, Rose Davis will take him on the rolls, give him another chance, promise even to promote him if he can pull himself together. She sees no other choice. Like so many of her students, DeAndre is keeping a foot in both camps, straddling for a brief moment the two disparate worlds. If she can keep him coming to school four days out of five—three days a week, even—she might have a shot. If he stops entirely, then she has lost another one—a gifted one, in fact—to the corner.

The door to Rose Davis’s office opens. She acknowledges DeAndre with a rueful nod.

“Hey,” he says, breaking the ice.

“You can come in,” she tells him.

DeAndre rises, glancing again at Rose as he steps past her in the office doorway. To his surprise, she is smiling.

Ella Thompson prepares herself slowly in the back bedroom of her apartment. Black dress, black hat, dress heels, gold earrings—she’s getting better at this drill than any person ought to be. Last month, the service was at March’s; today, the homecoming is at New Shiloh, and next week, it will be at Brown’s on Baltimore Street for a neighbor’s son. And Ella is always in the middle of it, measuring out a little more of herself for each eulogy, for each gospel hymn, as if sitting demurely in these pews and bearing witness to tragedy is some kind of career.

She pauses at the mirror with her makeup, listening for signs of life in the room across the hall. Nothing. Her youngest, Kiti, is pretending to be up and running when she knows he’s still face down in his pillow.

“Kiti?”

Silence.

“Keee-Teee! Are you up?”

She begins moving toward his bedroom door, but the click-clack of her heels gives warning. Before she can knock, her son greets her, bleary-eyed, at the bedroom door.

“Ma, I’m up.”

She smiles. “I’m serious now. You’ve got to get yourself dressed or we’ll be late.”

The seventeen-year-old nods, then pads to the bathroom. Ella goes back to the mirror, peering into the glass at a face that has somehow managed to keep a look far younger than forty-six years. Ella is very dark, with the deepest of brown eyes and perfectly straight, jet-black bangs that give her face a girlish quality. Even after five children, she has kept her figure, so that among the children of Fayette Street, the general consensus is that Miss Ella might be more than thirty, maybe even thirty-five if you count carefully.

On the other hand, such agelessness is wasted on Ella Thompson, who seems to concede nothing to her own vanity. She doesn’t work at looking younger, at changing her appearance or at obscuring her status as a middle-aged grandmother. Instead, she works at nearly everything else, and somehow, in a rush of well-spent days and months and years, she has forgotten to age.

But on this morning, quite naturally, the mirror gives Ella back a hint of fear. Today is for Dana Lamm, but her son, Tito, is the young man most on her mind.

The two had been inseparable since childhood. It had been a threesome, really—Tito and Dana, and then Gordon—three fine boys who were always rambling in and out of her rowhouse apartment, sharing with her their earliest triumphs, seeking her comfort when they stumbled. Ella had nurtured her son and his friends alike, encouraged them as she did everyone, watched with a cautious joy as each turned away from the corner. She had seen all the possibilities in those three boys and she had fought for those possibilities, inoculating each with her own unlikely optimism, her unwavering Christian purposefulness. School, work, respect, love, responsibility—from most any other soul on Fayette Street, such things were easily marked down as platitude. But from Ella Thompson, these things were life itself. With God’s own grace those three boys raised themselves up and got out. Her son to the navy, Gordon with him, and Dana to the marines.

Victories, she thinks, hunting down her black purse.

But then what is today? A victory emptied of itself, with Dana lost despite it all, dead from an electrocution at Camp LeJeune. A training accident. To survive a childhood in West Baltimore and then fall by random chance as a peacetime warrior—where in such an ending do you put your faith? Ella shakes her head. It makes no sense.

Worse still, Tito has disappeared. When Gordon called her with the news of Dana’s death, her thoughts jumped to her oldest son. She phoned Tito in California that night and listened as he poured out his grief, the hurt turned bitter because the navy had denied him permission to fly home for the funeral. His pain was fierce, and she let him rant and cry, absorbing as much of his suffering as she could. She consoled and counseled, finally eliciting from him a promise not to go absent without leave. But since then, it has been four days of silence.

Last night again, she had stayed up late trying to reach him, fretting away the three-hour time difference. Tito’s roommate was solicitous, but had no answer: “Haven’t seen him. Sorry, ma’am. I don’t know where he is.”

She knows her son. He is strong-willed. He would jeopardize everything to be with Dana today, and there is a part of her that wouldn’t be surprised to see Tito at the church an hour from now.

She pulls back from the mirror, brushing a few specks of lint from the dark fabric. Inspection complete.

“Kiti?” she calls, sending her voice down the narrow hallway to his room.

“In a minute,” he answers.

She waits for him in the living room, a cluttered but clean space at the front of the first-floor apartment. The walls are filled with pictures of family and friends, and she pauses at the door to seek out Tito’s portrait, the one of him in uniform. She vivdly remembers the day the picture was taken. Dana was supposed to be in the portrait, too, but he couldn’t find his dress pants, so he begged off while Tito and Gordon, decked in their military finery, went to the downtown studio. And next to that picture, the shot of Tito at his high school prom, and below that, a photo of her children—all of them—clustered together on a sofa. For a moment, Ella lets her eyes gaze on the face of her youngest, Andrea, who is about ten in the photograph. Then Ella quickly looks away, fighting down the wave of emotion that inevitably rolls over her when she thinks of Fatty Pooh.

Finally, Kiti joins her. She looks to him fondly as she adjusts his tie. She is a tall woman, but Kiti, a high school senior, towers over her as he submits to mothering.

“You look nice,” she says.

He smiles awkwardly. They go out the apartment door and onto the steps, where Ella surveys the Fayette Street strip as she pulls the front door closed. No one is hanging here in front of 1806, though just down the hill, Bruce Street is bustling. A look out slouches along Fulton Avenue.

Two regulars glide past, heading down the hill from Monroe. “Morning,” says the one closest.

“Good morning,” she replies. Her tone is open, a careful effort to avoid judgment; it’s Ella’s way to exclude no one. “How are you today?”

Both men offer affirmative grunts. Neither breaks stride as they sail on toward Bruce Street, wrapped in certainty and purpose. Kiti pockets his house key, ambles to the car, and at last they’re off, only to be snagged a block away by the traffic light at Monroe. As the engine idles roughly in the January cold, Ella watches Smitty and Gale in front of the bar; Gale, holding her baby as she touts a package, oblivious to the winter wind. Curt appears in the crosswalk, lifting his cane in acknowledgment of Ella, and from the front steps of the shooting gallery, with his satchel at his feet, Blue waves with genuine pleasure. An artist by trade, Blue still keeps his paints, markers, and a book of poems in that satchel, carrying it with him everywhere for fear of losing it in the needle palace. And Ella is working on Blue, trying to recruit him for an art class at the rec. She tries again today.

Kiti rolls down the passenger window and Ella calls to her neighbor.

“Hello, Mr. Blue. When you coming down?”

“Soon. Soon, Ella.”

“We need you, Blue.”

He flashes a self-deprecating smile, but only waves. No commitment this time; too much running and gunning. A shame, she thinks, watching the traffic up and down Blue’s steps.

The light changes and she drives on. The world of Fayette and Monroe fades, to be replaced in its turn by an endless succession of drug corners as the car rolls north through the heart of West Baltimore. Fulton and Lexington, Fulton and Edmondson, Fulton and Lanvale—all of them the same.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she says, as much to herself as to Kiti. If Ella Thompson has a practiced mantra, this is it: It doesn’t make sense. And to her, on the outside peering in, the corner world would never make sense. Strange, since she has spent so many years living at the edge of it. Stranger still, since she has seen it creep into her own life and destroy so much.

She was married a year and a half before she even had a clue. Allen was from a hardworking family, with steady work down at the General Refractors plant in Curtis Bay. It was a union job, decent money, and for a time, their life together seemed to promise a better future. Ella had been through one relationship already; her oldest child, Shulita, was by that man, and two more, Donilla and Tito, quickly followed from the marriage to Allen. At the least, a hardworking husband promised to take her away from the endless drudgery of packaging canned soups at the Gross & Blackwell Company, a merciless job for a twenty-five-year-old woman. For that alone, Allen was salvation of a kind, a knight in shining armor, and maybe that was why she was so slow to figure things out. They were always short of money as young couples with children are always short of money, so, naturally, she only noticed the backsliding when paid-for things started to disappear around the house. It was little things at first, food and small appliances, but eventually the big-ticket stuff too. Love kept her blind until the day she found his tools. With the spike out in the open, she swallowed her fear and tried confrontation, but that just made for another broken promise. What could she do? And where could she go? She was young then, with three children under the age of four, just frightened and foolish enough to try to ignore the drugging, and later, to ignore the beatings that came from guilty rage. She tried to wait him out, hoping against all logic that things would get better if she just loved him enough.

Her sister offered her refuge after one of those bad nights of abuse and tears. But even in that sanctuary, she couldn’t see her way to a solution. I’ve made my bed hard, she told her sister, then went home to suffer some more. Eventually, and through no decision of her own, she caught a break: Allen fell for three years on a state drug charge. He took that gray corrections division bus to Hagerstown; Ella and her children used the pause to fashion their escape.

Taking Fulton across North Avenue, Ella and Kiti reach the top end of Monroe Street and the New Shiloh Baptist Church, a bastion of the older order in black Baltimore, a magnet that still draws together the fragments of broken neighborhoods in a genuine display of power and glory.

On this cold, cloudy Friday, the parking lot is filling fast; cars, trucks, and minivans line up behind the hearse and limousine already waiting at the entrance. The good people—the whole of black Baltimore that stands apart from the corner—have come together in grief and tribute for one of their own.

Ella and Kiti join the throng as it moves rapidly through the lobby, filling the amphitheater of pews that fan out from the pulpit. Ella and her son move down an aisle and find seats; immediately, Ella begins looking around, scanning the faces row by row.

“Thank God,” she says finally.

Tito isn’t here.

A few minutes before the choir breaks out with the opening hymn, Gordon finds her. They embrace and he guides Ella to a coterie of polished young soldiers, introducing her to his friends. She smiles on all of them, so crisp in starched dress uniforms. Strong, fine men, she tells herself. Like Dana. Like Tito. Serious young men, they extend polite handshakes and soft words.

The service begins. Ella steps back into the aisle, grasps Gordon’s hand once again, then moves lightly to her own seat. Among the scores of churches that speckle black Baltimore from Hilton Parkway on the west side to Milton Avenue on the east—gothic piles and storefronts, old stone monoliths and rehabbed rowhouses—New Shiloh holds upper-rung status. On the west side, only Bethel A.M.E. and its legendary choir can argue greater standing in the community than New Shiloh. For Ella, who calls a more modest African Baptist church at Baltimore and Pulaski home, the vast auditorium and a full house of more than five hundred mourners gives weight and authority to Dana’s homecoming. So, too, does the Reverend Harold Carter.

“I am sad this morning,” he says, bearing down on the eulogy with a ringing tenor, “I am grieved, but I cannot, I will not be disappointed today.”

It isn’t the usual West Baltimore funeral oratory, the kind that gracefully forgives the frailty of the departed, that struggles to understand the will of God in a merciless world. Today, the Reverend Mr. Carter can offer words that are unlike so many others spoken from city pulpits. Today, he does not have to account for another young life squandered amid the drugs and the guns. Today, he is free to hail a right-living young man who transcended the corners to serve his country and, ultimately, to give his life not to a needle or handgun, but to the random chance of a loose electrical cable. In Baltimore, this is close enough to be called victory.

All of which is not lost on the reverend, who chooses this eulogy to draw the comparisons: Dana’s short life, the lives of so many others expended on the city’s streets. To the call-and-response of willing, waiting mourners, he hits every note:

“… because for once I am not here to bury a young man who lost his way in drugs and violence …”

“YES, LAWD.”

“… and for once I do not have to help a young man’s family and friends hold their heads high, for their heads are not bowed. There was no shame in the life of this fine young man.”

“TELL IT. TELL IT.”

The eulogy rolls outward in waves—cresting, ebbing, then cresting again until Harold Carter is at the crescendo, displaying for the faithful the talents that have accorded him the New Shiloh pulpit. Then, almost as a relief, the choir chimes in, followed by telegrams and messages of condolence and, finally, an accounting of an unfinished life, the obituary of Dana Lamm.

At the end of the service, Ella consults briefly with Kiti. They decide to ride with friends in the procession to the burial site at Arlington National Cemetery, south of Washington. Tito would have wanted that, and on this winter morning, his mother and brother are his loyal surrogates.

“Must be fifty cars,” says Kiti, as the procession begins to roll south on Monroe Street, or old U.S. 1 as it appears on the road maps. Monroe snakes south through block after block of rowhouses until it crosses the west side expressway.

At the intersection with Fayette, Ella sees that the packages are now out. Curt is on post in front of the liquor store with a half-dozen others, and Blue is tending to shooting gallery business from his front steps. The funeral rolls past them, then down the hill into the edges of hillbilly Pigtown and across Wilkens Avenue, where Monroe Street wraps itself around Carroll Park and then glides past the vacant Montgomery Ward warehouse and up the hill to the interchange with the interstate. The rowhouses, the corners, the raw, rust-belt industry give way to the clean, bare woods of the Baltimore-Washington parkway.

The forty-mile trip to Arlington takes more than an hour, a journey that ends with a phalanx of soldiers, black and white, gathered for a time-honored ritual as only the military can provide. A bugler sounds tender notes. On the ridge above, a squad in dress blues snaps to a muffled command. Rifles fire a sharp retort, and the mourners jump and bristle uncomfortably, the sound itself measured differently in the world they know. Ella watches, awed, as the stretch of flag is held taut above the finished coffin, the warriors making crisp, triangular folds. Then, with the click of locking heels, the folded flag is delivered to the grieving mother.

On the way home, Kiti sleeps soundly, and Ella is alone to think on the hallowed perfection of Arlington and to enjoy the greenery that surrounds Interstate 95 between the cities. Then Baltimore rises up, the vista of the city’s west side extending outward in a complex of broad horizontal lines, block after block of flat-roofed rowhouses, broken only by the occasional church spire.

Kiti wakes when Ella hits a red light at Carey Street.

“It’s depressing,” she says, confronted once again by the litter of men and women on the usual corners. “Even the air smells different.”

When Kiti gives her a look, she laughs. “I’m serious … It’s so depressing to come home. It’s sad.”

Kiti says nothing.

“What time is it?” she asks him.

“Two-thirty.”

Ella rushes into the apartment for a quick change of clothes, with Kiti behind her, heading listlessly toward his bedroom. She won’t worry about Kiti right now. He’ll be in his room, maybe on the phone with one of his girlfriends. Kiti doesn’t hang much, and for that, Ella is grateful.

Dressed in jeans, a sweatshirt, and a green hooded jacket, she leaves her car on Fayette, preferring to walk as a way of showing the flag. She moves at a brisk pace, looking neither right nor left, her visage set, her eyes cloaked. In this neighborhood, even Ella Thompson has a game face.

When she crosses Bruce, a tout steps up and announces his product without conviction. He can tell there’s no sale here, but figures there’s no harm trying.

A young slinger glares at the tout. “Not her, yo.”

He apologizes and Ella pushes on toward Mount, where the market chatter increases in volume. A generation back and Mount Street was lucrative territory that competing crews might war over. Now, though, with so many crews working so many packages, territory has ceased to be an issue. In Baltimore, anyone can sell anywhere, so long as there are fiends willing to pay. Now, a drug corner is all about product and name recognition.

“Got orange tops.”

“Big whites. Big white bags.”

“Reds. Red tops. Reds make you sparkle. Red tops.”

And, as always, “In the Hole.”

Black Beauty, a dark-skinned tout known for her hard look, is busy touting today for that crew, which sells heroin under a brand name that has its origin in local geography. Perfectly isolated, the back alley that runs between Mount and Vincent on the south side of Fayette has long been known as the Hole. In service of that brand, Black Beauty walks a tight circle on Mount Street, barking in mindless repetition, like a mating bird left lonesome in spring.

“In the Hole. In the Hole. In the Hole.”

Ella cuts diagonally across Mount and enters an alley that sits hard against the rubble of a collapsing rowhouse. She surveys an expanse of cracked, uneven blacktop, strewn with glass shards, corralled by the tatters of a chain-link fence. An old, twisted backboard with no rim, a swing set, monkey bars, and a sliding board with a mean metallic bite at the bottom are the archaeological remnants that suggest a playground.

On the northern edge of the lot squats a single-story, cinder-block building, its eyeless gray facade capped with a ribbon of dull red paint. Small and ugly and brooding, the thing was given life by an architect who might have learned his craft on the Maginot Line, so closely does it resemble a wartime bunker.

Ella catches sight of two adolescent figures leaning against one of the two concrete planter boxes that flank the metal grate. Manny Man and Tae are idling, waiting for the recreation center to open.

“Why aren’t you two in school?”

“We got a half-day,” Tae says easily.

The standard answer, delivered four times a week on the average. Ella gives them each a quick look, letting them feel her suspicion, but the boys stay passive. She mounts the steps, unbolts two heavy locks, and bends to pull up the metal grate. It squeaks protest and fights her all the way. She unlocks one of the two double doors and enters; the boys follow. Above the doorway, a bent square of tin proclaims, “The Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center.”

Stepping into the darkness, Ella fiddles with her key ring as she rushes to open the small back office and turn off the alarm system. She returns to flip up the bank of light switches.

“Sign the book,” she says as Tae bumps past Manny Man and claims the privilege of being the first to sign the composition notebook that serves as a roster for the flock of children who find their way here five days a week.

“I’m first,” says Tae, admiring his signature, “Dontae,” written in a neat, tight script on the first line.

“So what?” says Manny. “I been first before.”

Tae thumbs through the notebook. “Look who’s always first. R.C. Damn, that boy don’t never go to school,” he says.

Tae is deep into the notebook. He is a bantam-sized fifteen-year-old, with a wiry body of broad shoulders, long arms, and bowed legs. His hair is cut close and the skin of his face is pulled taut, giving him a pinched, sharp look. He flashes a wide grin.

“DeAndre, too. Them two boys be crazy,” he says with relish.

Tae still plays the game, going to school, doing his homework, obeying his mother’s curfew. He runs track and gets low-B grades and still has college or the military within his grasp. But today, he cut early to hook up with Manny Man and check the rumor that Miss Ella is thinking about a basketball team.

“When we gonna play?” asks Manny, trying to provoke her into a commitment.

“I don’t know yet. I wish you worried me about school the way you do about basketball,” she says.

“Miss Ella, we’d be good,” Manny pleads.

“We’ll see. Now don’t be pushing me.”

Ella retreats to her small back office, hoping for a moment or two to herself. She’s torn about the basketball idea and would like to think it through. A fifteen-and-under team would be a big commitment for her and the rec, but she knows she needs something to occupy the older boys, who are getting too rough for the smaller children. Some days, it’s all she can do to keep a semblance of order.

Outside, as if on cue, the larger room erupts in noise. There’s wild pounding against the double metal doors and laughter from Tae and Manny Man.

“I SAID OPEN THE DAMN DOOR.”

So much for a chance to think. Ella pushes her chair back, sighs, and goes out to open the door for Richard Carter.

“OPEN THE MOTHERFUCKING DOOR,” shouts R.C., as Tae and Manny sit smirking, content to watch him through the wire-mesh windows as he pounds away in frustration. They, in turn, are safe behind the rule that only Ella or her part-time assistant at the rec, Marzell Myers, is permitted to open the door.

“R.C., please,” says Ella, ending the standoff. “You don’t have to curse.”

“MISS ELLA,” he wails, his voice raised, as usual, to the level of a shout. “THEY WON’T OPEN THE DOOR.”

“R.C., you know the rules.”

“YEAH, BUT MISS ELLA, THEY WAS LAUGHING,” R.C. counters, his heavy face forming into its perpetual pout. The world has conspired against him; this is a belief so central to his being that it qualifies as religion.

“I know, R.C. Just calm down and sign the book.”

“Yes’m,” he says, still glaring hard at his tormentors. Walking past Ella, he lunges at Tae, grabbing the ledger from the smaller boy’s hands. Manny Man jumps to Tae’s defense, tossing a shot of his own in an effort to stir Ella’s ire: “R.C. don’t never be going to school.”

But R.C. recovers instantly. “Ringing a bell don’t do nothing for me,” he announces with pride.

Good one. Tae slides off the counter to salute R.C.’ s wit with a high five. Friendship restored, the two head for a row of tables where they can mess with a handful of battered board games, leaving Manny in the wake of Tae’s change of loyalty. Then, faithful as a puppy, he picks himself up and follows.

The rec proper isn’t much bigger than a good-sized classroom. Rows of tables and chairs on either side of a center aisle take up much of the space. To the right of the aisle, small cubby spaces designated “Library” and “Arts and Crafts” hug the wall. The four shelves of the library contain a perplexing assortment of hand-me-downs that, except in a rare case, sit untouched. The Arts and Crafts center, marked by a few pots of paint and glue, is a big hit with the younger kids.

To the left of the aisle stands a row of tall lockers, each emblazoned with a stern warning not to open them and remove the playthings, a right once again reserved for Miss Ella or Marzell. The lockers hold most of the remnants of games and toys that somehow have found their way to the rec. Candy Land, Connect Four, checkers, bits and pieces of Monopoly.

Stacked next to the lockers atop plastic milk crates are an ancient receiver, a speaker, a dusty turntable, an old TV, and a VCR. On the adjacent wall hangs a cheerful mural—the work of Neacey, Gandy, and some of the other older girls—depicting fairy-tale characters under the leafy arms of a tree.

Between the bathrooms on the back wall is a weight set, the lone bar resting in the metal arms of a vinyl bench. A metal stand adorned with a collage of African masks created by the younger children and a wall poster featuring coloring book representations of famous African-Americans add to the rear of the room.

All of this is spotlessly clean, lovingly maintained by Ella and Marzell, with some occasional help from the older girls. The tile floor is mopped daily, the tables cleaned, the chairs neatly aligned. The depressing weight of the dropped tile ceiling is lightened a bit by a long string of red and green crepe paper adorned with balloons, a leftover from the Christmas pageant. In all, the interior of the rec is festive enough, appealing to the little ones, who accept the illusion. The older kids need more, Ella knows, and so she worries.

A soft knocking catches her ear between R.C.’ s raucous bellows, as he celebrates victory in a game of Connect Four. Ella checks the clock—half past three, not yet time for the little ones to be here—before getting up to again open the rec door. In totters six-year-old Dena Sparrow, barely able to move in a bundle of winter clothing but early as usual because her family lives just across the alley. Ella welcomes Dena, guides her over the threshold, and reaches back to close the door. It doesn’t budge.

“DeAndre, let go of the door,” she orders.

A solemn DeAndre McCullough enters, walking past Ella without so much as hello. Chin riveted to his chest, arms stiff at his sides, he moves with his practiced roughneck walk, a gait of locked knees and stiff spine. The cold day clings to his demeanor.

“Hello, DeAndre,” says Ella.

“Huh.”

“Hello, DeAndre,” she tries again.

“I said hey,” he mumbles, obviously irritated. He stops at the desk and signs the book, then sheds his coat, throwing it casually on the counter. Unencumbered, he stalks past the others without a glance of recognition. He unbuttons his flannel shirt and lets it fall in a heap. His T-shirt follows, the one with the cartoon of a hopper smoking a blunt. Bare-chested and muscled, he swings onto the bench and hefts the weight. He does bench presses mindlessly, with no program, tiring quickly.

“Twenty-five. Yeah boy,” he says, sitting up.

He lifts the bar again and does ten long, slow arm curls. Finishing, he sets it on the floor. Turning to the others, he flexes his arms. “Steel,” he says, banging his chest. “I’m a man.”

The others ignore him, but little Dena, watching from a chair near Ella’s office, makes her way slowly across the room. She smiles broadly, intrigued by the free weights and DeAndre both. The girl bends her little body over the bar and tries a lift. DeAndre stoops behind her and curls the weight up and over her head.

“Girl, you strong,” he announces, helping her set the bar down. He lifts her in the air, and she beams a smile. He spins her around, his face alive with joy. “She stronger than you, R.C.,” he laughs, as Dena hugs him.

Ella watches, pleased. For all his bluster, DeAndre is good with the little ones.

More roughnecks arrive. Huggie and the twins, Arnold and Ronald, bound through the doors, excitement glowing on their faces. “Got that cat,” Arnold announces, proudly, piquing R.C.’ s interest.

“Yeah. We got that cat been hitting our coop,” Ronald boasts.

“What cat?”

“Cat been getting our birds,” Ronald says. “Huggie killed it dead.”

“Yeah, what you do?” R.C. asks.

“Caught that cat and threw it in with Shamrock’s pit bull. Tore his ass up,” Huggie says proudly.

“Shit, that ain’t nothin’,” R.C. says, punching a hole in their glee. “You shoulda got DeAndre.”

“Oh, yeah?” Ronald says, a little hurt. “You should of heard that bitch scream.”

“DEANDRE,” R.C. roars, “DEANDRE, COME HERE. YO, TELL THEM WHAT YOU DO WHEN A CAT GOES AFTER YOUR BIRDS.”

DeAndre puts Dena down and slowly joins the boys.

“Go on, tell them,” R.C. urges.

DeAndre smiles. “This cat been around my coop, trying to get in. I saw him and went and got this pair of thick gloves, the kind my uncle uses with the crabs, real thick so you can’t get scratched. Then I trapped that motherfucker. He tried to get me but he couldn’t get through the gloves.”

DeAndre has seated himself on a table. The other boys, R.C. included, are silent as DeAndre’s enthusiasm for his tale catches hold of them.

“He was tough,” DeAndre says. “I broke his legs, broke each one. Then I tied him up and hung him from this tree …”

His voice drops, drawing the others closer.

“… got me some lighter fluid, squirted that sucker down, then hit him with a match. Fucked him all up.”

“MAN, YOU A CRAZY FUCKER,” R.C. shouts, while Tae and Manny bang the table in approval.

“Damn,” Ronald says, admitting admiration.

Ella has stopped working with the little children. Frozen by DeAndre’s account, she is slow to respond. “DeAndre,” she asks finally, “why did you do that? That cat was only doing what it has to.”

“Miss Ella, a cat gotta do what a cat gotta do and I gotta do what I gotta do,” DeAndre answers, nonchalant. His response touches something deep within the other boys and they howl approval.

“You sick, boy,” R.C. says, elated with it.

“Cat killed my birds,” says DeAndre with finality. “Cat gotta pay.”

Ella shakes her head. She has known DeAndre most of his life; she’s seen him as a lovesick puppy, chasing her Pooh up and down Fayette Street, working through the agony of that first childhood crush. She’s seen him running the streets, getting into more and more mayhem as he has grown. She knows DeAndre is clever and open and capable of wonderful moments, like before, when he had Dena Sparrow laughing with delight. She also knows he can, if the idea suits him, torture and burn a cat.

The phone rings and Ella steps back into her office. Good news, thank God. Tito is home in California, having gone no farther than a long, all-night drive down the coast. Ella gets the word from her daughter, hangs up and sighs, visibly relieved.

“Miss Ella?”

Little Stevie is at her office door.

“What, Stevie?”

“Can we take the football out on the playground?”

“If you bring it back.”

He races off and Ella leaves the office to spend the rest of the afternoon with the younger children. The older boys soon depart, off on some business best discussed outside the rec. R.C.’ s voice lingers, carrying from Mount Street.

Eventually, the darkness presses in and Ella checks the clock. It’s half past six, time to send her charges home. As a last ritual, she gathers Tastykakes and potato chip bags—snacks that come to the rec center from Echo House, the neighborhood outreach center, and the St. Martin’s parish soup kitchen—passing them out as the kids move back across the threshold, huddling on the blacktop around the dim light that escapes from the windows in the rec center’s doors.

Inside, surrounded by the sudden silence, Ella lugs out the bucket and mop, and begins to clean. She returns the toys and games to the lockers, straightens the chairs, cleans the finger paint from one of the table tops. She looks around, satisfied at last. Then she turns out the light, locks the door, rolls down the grate, and steps into darkness. Some of the kids are playing on the sliding board, some follow her to Mount Street, where the constant drone becomes specific.

“Got them red tops.”

“In the Hole.”

“Death Row.”

Ella watches two of the children cross Fayette Street amid a swarm of dealers scrambling to serve two white men in a pickup.

She draws her coat close and crosses Mount Street, moving once again through the corner crowd.

No sense at all.

Fran Boyd is up out of the basement early this morning, smoking the day’s first Newport and watching from the top step, her usual perch, as Mount and Fayette begins to stir. Up at Mount, Buster and Country have dragged their tired carcasses to the corner and are waiting stoically for Scar to bring the package. A couple doors from Fran, Ronnie Hughes is out front as well, tinkering with the engine of his shit-brown Buick, trying to get it started on this late January morning. DeRodd’s father, Michael Hearns, waits beside Ronnie wordlessly, his breath freezing above him in small soft clouds. The two are planning an expedition to a county mall, and Ronnie likes to get an early jump whenever possible. Better to get in and out before the security people are fully alert.

“Hey, Fran,” Ronnie calls. An invitation.

She nods curtly, but says nothing. Sitting there in the cold, her narrow behind resting on an old sofa cushion, Fran is dressed more for fall than the deep of winter. Seemingly oblivious to the chill, she looks past Ronnie to scour the traffic around Fayette and Mount, searching for that first thin thread of a caper that can be parlayed into a vial or two of coke to go on top of the morning’s blast of dope. As for a daytime boosting spree with Ronnie and Michael, she’ll pass. For one thing, it hasn’t been great with Michael lately; she can’t remember what it was she saw in him. For another, things haven’t been feeling right in the stores, what with Fran worrying about another charge and security always breathing down her neck. Instead, she settles down on the front steps of the Dew Drop, waiting for a better alternative. She sits and glares, her rock-solid, don’t-tread-on-me visage offering nothing beyond raw calculation.

The front matters to Denise Francine Boyd, because the tough exterior is always an essential part of her game. Can’t let anyone believe there are cracks in the facade, because facade is most of what she is about. The I-don’t-give-a-shit stare, the implication of recklessness accord her a high berth in the pecking order. And like anyone else closing in on a second decade of addiction, she’s also blessed with a mind that can find angles in a circle. Little Fran, all ninety-five pounds of her, is a coke-thinned wraith pushing the far side of her thirties, making it mostly on bark and only the rare bite. She has a face for the corner, armored by hard-boiled eyes that float in a sienna tea—a cold glare to deny even the suggestion of complex feelings. But behind the front is a woman with a battered, but still usable conscience—a caring soul that time and again proves itself a burdensome source of pain. Fran isn’t like Bunchie, her sister; years of living together have convinced Fran that Bunchie could truly care less about anything but getting that blast. Same with Stevie. Same with Sherry, if you counted liquor.

There is Scoogie, of course, the oldest Boyd, living large a few blocks over in their grandmother’s house. Scoogie has a job and a car and cable TV and air-conditioning and everything else that doesn’t exist at the Dew Drop Inn. But there’s distance between Fran and her brother; she can’t lean on him, particularly with Scoogie insisting that he’s clean now, that he hasn’t been high in more than four years.

Fran doesn’t believe it, and resents Scoogie for pretending to be better than she suspects he is. Still, Scoogie is living head-and-shoulders above the Dew Drop, and Fran is, therefore, by default, the closest thing to a moral force at the Fayette Street house. She’s the one who ventures into the kitchen to make sandwiches for DeRodd and his nephew, Little Stevie, who makes sure the school clothes are there, who interrupts the party in the basement to go upstairs and check on Ray Ray and her heart monitor. If there’s any weakness in Fran’s game, in fact, it’s in the vestiges of morality that her mother planted inside her, that special something the other children didn’t seem to get. But that all belongs to the early years, before her father’s anger managed to beat her mother down, before her mother found solace in the bottle and turned her back on Fran, before the Boyd children followed each other from malt liquor to cough syrup, weed to dope, dope to coke. So much pain, too much to think on right now.

Fran continues scanning the street, and finally, sees Tyrell post himself on the corner, hooking up with Buster and Country. Fran gives him a little wave from her doorway. He nods slightly.

Yes Lawd, she thinks, Tyrell’s down for the usual. Scar will be along soon and, as Scar’s lieutenant, Ty will then be in possession of the package, responsible for getting it out on the street, handling the money and the drugs while Scar sits back on rowhouse steps and eyes the action. Country and, if he’s lucky, Buster, will do the touting for Scar’s green tops. But it’s Tyrell who will take most of the risk, and Fran knows that Tyrell is beginning to stumble, dipping into the product.

She saw him at it last month in the vestibule of her house; his body bent over, his nose dipping into his palm. Sensing her, he jerked himself erect and tried to play it off. Something in my eye, he muttered, and she just smiled.

Out here, necessity always gives birth to a caper and it wasn’t long before Fran had Tyrell coming around the back of her house after Scar gave him the package, hooking up with Fran in the few minutes before he re-upped his workers. Just inside the basement door, she would shake the vials, skimming some of the coke off the top. Nobody was the wiser.

So now she waits, her eyes locked on the other half of her little conspiracy. In another minute or two, Scar turns onto Fayette Street from Gilmor and walks toward Mount. Dressed in army fatigues, a walking bill-board for his Green Tops, there isn’t much flash to Scar—just a New York Boy, solitary and mysterious, a stranger to the neighborhood who showed up on the corner four or five years ago and began hustling. Nobody thought to challenge Scar because, in the end, nobody cared. His product is decent and that’s what matters. Besides, rumor has the New Yorkers all wired up with heavy connections. Fuck with them, and they blow you up and move to some new corner. No one on Fayette was really all that interested in taking any chances until last year, when the Diamond in the Raw crew started stretching out, declaring that Baltimore was for Baltimore people alone. There were three or four bodies—a couple of New Yorkers and a couple locals—and Scar felt compelled to disappear for a time. But then some of the Diamond crowd got scooped up by the Feds and things cooled. Scar was soon back on post, still a stranger; no one knew his name, his family, or even where he laid his head.

Reputation and mystery aside, it is the lot of the New Yorkers—Scar, Primo, Gee Money, and the rest—to rely on the locals to sling and tout their product, and in West Baltimore, at least, good help is hard to find. Scar has a professional’s sense of discipline; save for weed, he doesn’t get high. Tyrell, however, is weak and Fran has found him.

Fifteen minutes later, she’s up from the basement for the second time today, feeling very good indeed after reaping the benefits of her backdoor confederacy. She’s out on the stoop, watching Collins make a pass by the Mount Street touts in one of those new baby blue police cruisers, when Gary McCullough slips around the corner, his face aglow.

“Hey,” says Gary.

“Hey,” says Fran.

“Stevie upstairs?”

Fran nods and Gary starts past her. When they were together, Gary would talk forever about all this bullshit, rambling on about religion or politics or the stock market until Fran’s head was pounding. Now, between them, most conversations have a utilitarian simplicity. Gary spoke to her when he had something, when he needed something, or worst of all, when he failed to get something. Lord, she couldn’t stand to hear that man cry and whine.

“Want some?” he asks her on the way inside.

Fran shakes her head, thinking there ain’t going to be anything to share if he’s going to have Stevie cop for him. Gary was forever looking for someone else to go up to the corner on his behalf, thinking that a player with a harder look is less likely to get burned, when in fact it’s always a crapshoot. And Stevie—Lord, Fran’s brother might bring real dope back, but he had a dresser drawer upstairs with half a dozen syringes, each cocked and loaded with nothing stronger than tap water, each set to a different dosage—from twenty on the hype all the way to sixty. A mark like Gary would take his eyes off Stevie for half a second and the magic would never come.

Sure enough, he’s downstairs on the steps ten minutes later, his ten dollars wasted and his face contorted in epic grief.

“Man,” he says. “It was doo-doo.”

Fran shakes her head.

“You just don’t know,” says Gary, wounded. “I mean, dag.”

Fran snorts derisively. “Gary,” she says. “You get watered-down so much you should have leaves and shit growing out your arms.”

“What?”

“You a got-damn plant.”

No sympathy shown. Fran is hard; she can play the corner, but Gary is another thing entirely. By Fran’s reckoning, the longer he stays out here, the longer he takes abuse.

“This isn’t your game,” she tells him.

“Yeah,” he says, bitterly. “All right.”

“I’m serious. You not made for this.”

“Yeah, right.”

She shakes her head and Gary drifts up the block, muttering to himself. Fran watches him go, feeling an utter sense of loss. Gary has been out here for years now, but still, on some level, she cannot accept it. Though there is no love left, she still cares for him and it’s hell to see him lost out here in a world for which he is totally unsuited. A part of Fran still wants to protect Gary, but the greater share of her knows there is no such thing as protection. For worse rather than better, Gary is in the mix.

His fall from grace had a slow inevitability, but there were moments when it seemed like a rush job because Gary never did anything halfheartedly. Fran actually cried the first time she saw him on the corner copping ready rock. People had been telling her for weeks that he was on the pipe, that he was up on Monroe Street every day, but she had never seen it and didn’t believe it. Gary had for years been about nothing stronger than an occasional joint of weed; he had, for most of their time together, been down on Fran for her drugging. More than dope or coke, Gary was into his mysticism and cosmology, talking that high-on-life bullshit and working three jobs at once, bringing home so much money. When they were together, when DeAndre was little, Fran spent a lot of her time rushing around the county shopping malls trying to spend it, buying so many outfits and shoes, so much jewelry that she could never manage to wear it all. She just left most of it in the boxes or gave it away to friends. And DeAndre would be bouncing around the living room on Fayette Street with a $100 bill in his pocket—a child too young to even know what the cash was about. Gary would give him the money to show that he could, to make it clear to everyone that there was more than he needed.

Looking back, Fran sees that she never really appreciated what they had, that she never understood why Gary worked so hard at so many jobs. In fact, she had never really been in love with him. At best, she had loved the idea of Gary, the raw energy of this wide-eyed workaholic who couldn’t stop spinning plans for them—plans that had started to take shape and very nearly became reality.

She met him sixteen years ago when he was working at the pharmacy at Lexington and Fulton, making legitimate money as a counterman and then dealing some weed on the side. Fran did what came naturally; she flirted and talked enough shit to mess his little mind. Soon enough, her weed was for free.

But the Boyds were street and Gary was, well, a McCullough. One of those churchgoing McCulloughs from Vine Street. From the first, Fran knew it was an unholy union. She saw how vulnerable he was, how little prepared he was for the real world of Fayette Street. Gary sold weed because he wanted quick money, but he was terrified of anything stronger; then he quit dealing altogether when his mother expressed her disapproval. Fran played at him for a while and Gary was enamored and willing. But he wasn’t hard like the others. He didn’t seem man enough to her.

They had sex exactly once before Gary went off to college in Ohio. Fran knew she was pregnant, but let him go anyway, figuring it was his due, reasoning that Gary had no real business in her world. Five months into the pregnancy, she sent a telegram to Youngstown—not to bring Gary McCullough back, but simply to let him know what he had a right to know.

To her amazement, the boy came back to West Baltimore.

And Fran Boyd had never in her life had that kind of loyalty. She had never had anyone tell her he loved her to a point where she actually started believing it. But she wasn’t the right woman for Gary; she knew that much now. She wasn’t ever going to be the stay-put type, the happy homemaker that he was looking for. From the moment they moved in together, Gary made it clear he wanted her to be like his mother, and Fran made it equally clear she wasn’t Miss Roberta. She was the party girl and she’d been at the party ever since school days.

Gangsters and players and users peopled her world. Yet there she was playing house with Gary, a true believer, a man who embraced everything from Muslim theology to vegetarianism. He worshiped science, too, as if it was a religion, reading his high school physics text over and over, talking endlessly about the great day when he would go back to Ohio State and become an engineer.

But with DeAndre in a crib, the college plans were deferred. Still, Gary managed to manufacture a future far beyond anything Fran had ever allowed herself to imagine. The union job down at the Point became a supervisory position—$55,000 a year—and on top of that, Gary was moonlighting as a security guard out in Woodlawn. Fran had a good job downtown at the phone company and Gary was making even more money with his stocks and mutual funds. He bought the house at 1717 Fayette. He bought investment properties around the neighborhood and then he, Blue, and Blue’s brother started Lightlaw, their development and drafting company. Gary bought Fran a Mercedes. Bought himself another. Bought all kinds of things for Fran and DeAndre and everyone else.

At first Fran loved it. She tried harder to love Gary, and for a time, all things seemed not only possible, but certain. But thinking back, Fran can remember a pivotal moment somewhere back in ’80 or ’81, a point at which she really had to decide. DeAndre was three or four, almost school age, and they were considering a house out over the city line in Catonsville, a suburban spread like those acquired by the older McCullough children, who were using new money and new opportunity to escape Fayette Street. Gary wanted that life, too; Fran balked. She couldn’t see herself out there where Gary wanted her, tooling around some kitchen counter with an apron on. No parties, no drama, no corners—that wasn’t her at all.

They stayed in the house on Fayette Street instead, and the neighborhood began to wear at them the way it wears at everyone. Soon, the weed and beer and pills were the sum of all days. She was twenty-four and living with Gary on the day she truly found her future—the day they buried her sister, Darlene. That, too, would have been ’80 or ’81 if she remembered right, and Fran was out-of-her-mind grieving at the wake when a family friend brought dope to her for the first time.

“Do a line of this,” he told her.

Three years older than Fran, Darlene had died in a house fire at 1625 Fayette, burned over eighty percent of her body in the same back bedroom where Fran was now laying her head. On the day of the wake, she put her head down on that mirror, snorted all she could of that powder and came up forgetting that her sister was dead. The same friend came looking for Fran the next day, found her, and gave her the same. The day after that, he didn’t come. The day after that, Fran went looking for the friend.

After a time, she got so she’d keep the shit right by her bed, do some of it the first thing every morning before getting dressed in her downtown clothes. She didn’t even know she had a habit until the dose wasn’t there one morning and she realized she was too hungry to go to work without it. Sick in the mornings and missing work, or happily indifferent and cursing her supervisors, Fran kept messing up until the phone company fired her; the union did precious little to prevent it.

When he couldn’t find a future in Fran, Gary, too, began to lose himself on Fayette Street. At first he fought with her over the drugging. And when he laid hands on her, she moved out, telling herself that she wouldn’t be beaten as her mother had been beaten. Gary wandered off in search of other women and new religions and a half-dozen other schemes—all of it delaying the inevitable crash. And when nothing else worked, Gary chose, consciously and deliberately, to lose himself in dope and coke. The jobs and the cars and the houses were stripped away and, in the end, he and Fran were both scraping bottom—separate, yet together—moving to the same tired rhythms.

The neighborhood blamed her for what had happened to Gary. Bullshit, she told herself. As if the two of them didn’t make their own choices; as if she had some kind of power over Gary that he didn’t have over himself; as if she didn’t have enough problems of her own.

What she couldn’t stand about Gary was the pity parties he would throw for himself, the crying and complaining about how he once had it all and how he had been betrayed. Like today, when he wanders off bitching and moaning at the injustice of it all, at having been watered down, as if anyone out here had any guarantee of fair treatment. Outwardly, at least, Fran would never let anyone see her show hurt that way. With no regrets, she ran her own games on people when she could, and she couldn’t really blame anyone who managed to run a game on her. It pissed her off when Gary came to her with his wounds. She couldn’t make it better for herself; how was she going to help Gary?

For another hour, she watches the ebb and flow on Mount and Fayette, watches as the touts sell out, then re-up, then sell out again, watches as the knockers roll up to the carryout, jack the corner boys against the wall and come up empty. Every day, the street parade passes in front of these steps and every day, rain or shine or snow, Fran is outside to watch it pass.

She misses precious little. Too many years on Fayette Street have provided her with an extra sense, a hunter’s instinct that allows her to see things on the street that would be lost on an outsider. Without a scorecard, she knows at any given moment who is selling for whom, who is stealing from whom, who is about to get hurt, and who will do the hurting. Fran can spot confrontations and connections a block away; it’s her stock-in-trade, an acquired gift that allows her an edge. Like now, when she glances two full blocks down Fayette Street and picks up the outline of a teenage boy—one in a group of four—crossing the asphalt with a stiff-legged gait.

DeAndre. With R.C. and Dorian and Boo, probably.

If he tries to tell her he was in school today, he’s got a surprise coming, she thinks. Expecting him to go straight to Fairmount, she’s surprised when he peels off from the group and heads her way.

“Why you not in school?”

“Half-day.”

“Half-day? It’s not even eleven.”

“Half half-day,” he assures her.

“Andre, you is a trip,” she says, shaking her head. “All that work to get back into Francis Woods, and here you at, running the streets.”

“My teachers let me out,” he insists.

“Please,” says Fran.

He shrugs. Not every lie need be believed; some are spoken simply as a formality.

“You got cigarettes?” she asks.

“Not for you.”

“Lemme have one,” she insists.

DeAndre ignores her and walks to the carryout. She smolders as she watches him go. Goddamn if he doesn’t think he’s the little king of everything. He goes out on the corner for a week or two, gets some money in his pocket and thinks he’s some kind of man. And it’s worse, she thinks, since he put Bugsy on me. DeAndre thought he’d backed her down because of that shit. Fuck no, that wasn’t the way it played at all. Of course, he don’t know that, the little shit.

Three weeks back, Bugsy had showed up at the front steps, asking for Fran, asking for the sixty-five vials and two hundred in cash that she had found in the closet. Like the other New Yorkers, Bugsy generally kept his business to himself. But when there was a problem, he came right at you.

“Black says you took my stuff,” said Bugsy, using DeAndre’s favorite street name. The dealer was softspoken and very calm, strangely so for someone no older than twenty. Fran still couldn’t believe her son—who had put her in, and worse, she was unnerved by Bugsy’s seeming reasonableness. If he had come on strong, Fran would have known how to deal with that. But the quiet certainty in Bugsy’s play was scary—not only for Fran, but for her child. As pissed as she was at DeAndre, she had to think about both ends. Bugsy could come back on him.

“He shouldn’t’ve brought it in my house.”

“That’s between him and you. I want what’s mine.”

“Look,” she said, quickly reasonable herself. “I can get you the gun back, but I ain’t got the money or the stuff. If you’re going to hurt him, I can pay you back, but I’m going to need some time.”

Bugsy mulled it over for a moment. “Get me the gun. He’ll pay me back the money. He only owes me sixty from the last one.”

“Okay. I’ll get the gun and give it to him.”

“That’ll work,” he agreed, still very relaxed.

Things had evened out since then. Fran knew DeAndre believed she had learned her limit; Fran, however, was merely biding time. If her son brought more of his misadventure into her home, she would pluck him good. And while Fran knew she had provoked the crisis by stealing the stash, she told herself that she had, in the end, proved herself a mother by protecting DeAndre from the wrath of his supplier.

Not that he knew any of that, strutting around here like Big Daddy Kane. DeAndre wasn’t humble by nature, and he was at his worst with a little money in his pocket. Yet even from inside the heroin fog, Fran knew she had pushed her son into open rebellion, that his time on the corner was as much about her drugging as it was it was about status or money.

The boy had lived in the equivalent of a shooting gallery for the last three years. He was old enough now to judge her and to act on that judgment. By degrees, he had rendered his verdict and established himself apart from her. And his new universe, Fairmount and Gilmor, offered a ready-made haven for a child in full rebellion. For a time, she had railed against it, trying at every turn to retain her authority, to demand that DeAndre do as she told him, not as she herself did. Last year, when he was slinging, she put him out of the house only to watch him set up his little clubroom up at 1717. Last month she tried to lay down some law and ended up breaking a broom handle over his head. DeAndre simply wrested the stump from her grip and backed her against the kitchen wall, menacing her, letting her know his strength before laughing loudly and stalking off.

In DeAndre’s mind, Fran knows, there is the notion that at fifteen years, he’s a man. Her son is by no means cutting the ties with her; they are still family, to be sure, but he is no longer letting her treat him as her child. The change infuriates Fran. And it pains her.

Because in ways that matter, Fran tells herself, she’s been a real mother to DeAndre and DeRodd. True, the coke and dope haven’t left much money for new high-tops or weekend movies or Sega Genesis games. Still, her habit has never clouded her love for her sons, and she knows they both feel it. The back bedroom isn’t much, but her children have never been without a place to lay their heads. Nor has there been a day when they went hungry, or left the house without school clothes. Time and again, she feels, she has proven herself a mother to DeAndre by standing with him against the city bureaucracies. She’s been there for the meetings with the vice principals and for the suspension hearings at the school headquarters on North Avenue. She’s been there at the precincts to take custody of him after every arrest, or at the juvenile hearings at the courthouse downtown. She’s been there with him at Bon Secours and University Hospital, there in the emergency room for the skinned knees and broken bones, the asthma attacks and kitchen burns. And she’s always been there for him in the quiet moments, when he would lose his bluster and let his fears show, when he needed to be stroked and comforted.

She isn’t consistent; she knows that. In calmer moments, Fran can readily admit to shortcomings, citing her failures as a parent with cold precision. But she will argue in the next breath—and argue with some validity—that her sons are better off than so many others who are running loose on Fayette Street, raising each other in packs on the corners, making up the rules as they stumble through the shards of broken childhood. Dink-Dink, for instance, who at thirteen is already a stone sociopath, out on the corners at all hours, shooting at grown men over drug debts, or disrespect, or simply for the sheer joy of pulling the trigger. Or Dink-Dink’s running buddies, Fat Eric and Lamont—children crazed enough to fire pellet guns at passing police cars or to storm into the Korean carryout with their zippers open, waving their equipment at customers and the embarrassed counter girls. Or the twins—Arnold and Ronald, the oldest sons of Gary’s girl, Ronnie—who left school at fourteen to run wild. Two years from now, they will be keeping house in an apartment on Fairmount, an address they’ll acquire when the adult occupant is sent to jail. The twins will kick in a back window, then come and go as they please, their days occupied with the sale of drugs along Gilmor Street, their nights spent turning the apartment into an amusement park for the rest of the neighborhood kids. Fetid trash will be left where it’s dropped; human feces in the corners, bullet holes in every kitchen appliance, chair, and wall. And all of it will go on with their mother in the apartment directly below, concerned with nothing beyond her high.

The Dink-Dinks and Fat Erics of the neighborhood were a year or two behind DeAndre and his contemporaries, but even among the Fayette Street regulars they are regarded as a wild, new breed: violent, unsocialized, devoid of responsibility, without connection to family or friends or even to themselves. And while Dink-Dink and his crew mark the first wave, the disaster is clearly accelerating. Younger packs are already making their mark in this neighborhood; Old Man and Chubb, for example, are already up on the corners at nine or ten years, running for the Mount Street dealers.

Fran has given DeAndre and DeRodd more than that. Even now, though lost in addiction, there are things that she won’t do:

She won’t put her kids out on the corner to work a package for her benefit; that DeAndre is on Fairmount is his own decision and against her will. She won’t hold DeAndre’s drugs, or hide his gun, or teach him what she knows about how to cut dope or stretch a package into better profit. She won’t wink at his misadventures on the corner, allying herself with his cause for the sake of the dollars or vials that might come to her. She hates that he is already on the corner; she hates listening to the gunshots that echo from Fairmount and Gilmor at night, wondering if the ambo siren is for DeAndre or if the police wagon racing around the corner has been called for her son. She hates that he’s already smoking those big Philly blunts, starting out with $10 bags of weed, the same way she did. She can’t stop any of it, of course; she’s compromised, a parent without proper standing. But neither will she give it the sanction so many others do.

Nor will her sons be seen eating at the soup kitchen at St. Martin’s so that their mother can spend the food money on drugs. DeAndre will not suffer Easter without a new outfit and a new pair of Nike Airs; DeRodd won’t mark his birthday without a cake, or Christmas without some kind of toy. These things matter to Fran, who can tell herself that she manages to keep just enough balance in a world that is tumbling all over the place. And by that thin standard, she’s entirely correct: Where so many others have given up entirely, Fran Boyd is still a mother to her children.

Not that Andre acknowledges it. Now that he’s out from under her wing, taking what she’s given as his due, he demands more, and his manner turns sullen and pouting when more isn’t forthcoming. I’m on my own out here, DeAndre likes to tell his friends. Nobody does nothing for me.

He just doesn’t know. Fran is tempted to put him out again like she did last summer, or at least charge him some rent if he’s not going to go to school. What she ought to do—what she would like to do—is whip his ass good. But those days are long gone.

So all right then, she tells him in an imagined rant, you’re a big boy now. You’re the man. You just go ahead and play it like that and the next time Collins gets out of a police car to kick your ass, you’re on your own. And the next time they call me from the school about one of your fuck-ups, you’re not going to have me down there lying for you. And the next time you’re downtown for a juvenile hearing, you won’t see me. Your ass’ll get flat on that courthouse bench waiting for your mother to show.

Fran pumps herself full of indignation, squirming on that crushed couch cushion now, aching to pounce the next time he rolls past her steps. She’s had her fill; her eyes flash anger as she looks up toward Mount Street and sees DeAndre stepping from the carryout. Look at him, she thinks, all wrapped up in himself, as if it’s all about him. Fuck that.

Halfway down the block, DeAndre seems to sense her glare and quickly locks into it, goading her with a blank stare of his own as he moves toward her. He slows his pace, but his eyes never waver. Fran rises as DeAndre nears the foot of the stoop, his hands buried deep in his coat pockets. He barely breaks stride as one hand snakes out and tosses her a small paper bag, which she catches instinctively.

Smokes. She shakes her head. “Why you play me that way?”

DeAndre laughs, walking on toward Fairmount.

“Damn you, Dre,” she shouts. “Get back here.”

But DeAndre ignores her.

Shit, says Fran to herself, glumly peeling the cellophane from the pack. Why he got to be like that? Always setting her up just to knock her back down. Always letting her see the worst in him, and then, at the last possible moment, coming through with a little bit of heart.

Like this last Christmas Eve, when the money was gone and DeRodd had his Santa list of toys all written out. Fran felt like she had no choice and rode the bus out to Reisterstown Mall, then raced through the stores on a last-minute boosting spree. She was just starting to get it done, too, until she forgot to take the security tags from several items, setting off alarms as she left one store. One mall guard actually chased her into the parking lot and Fran just managed to get on a southbound M.T.A. Scared and breathing hard, she looked back over her shoulder and saw one of them jawing into his walkie-talkie. A few blocks farther, when a police cruiser pulled alongside the bus, Fran slipped out the rear doors, turned a corner, and got so damn lost in Northwest Baltimore that by the time she made her way home, the stores were closed.

Thinking on it now, she can remember climbing the steps to that back room in the worst kind of mood, kicking herself for letting it slide to the eleventh hour, dreading the look in DeRodd’s eyes. She went drag-ass into the bedroom to find DeAndre on the bed watching television, a pile of shopping bags on the floor in front him.

“Wassup,” he said.

It was all there—everything on DeRodd’s wish list and more besides, all of it purchased with the cash from Fairmount Avenue. Fran was overwhelmed.

“Thought you might be havin’ some trouble,” her son said.

“I was.”

And that time, DeAndre didn’t play it for pride or advantage. He didn’t shame her. If anything, he was a little embarrassed by it all. She reached across the bed, tugging on his shirt sleeve, pulling his head next to hers. No words, but a quick embrace. A connection.

Damned if that wasn’t DeAndre, too. Hardheaded, arrogant, sullen —but at moments he could step outside of himself, drop the game face, and be capable of anything. Fran smiles at the memory; her boy is a trip.

She watches him turn the corner at Gilmor, pulling his denims back up over his ass and hunkering himself into his lock-legged strut. If I could get past this, she thinks, if I could get myself clean, there would still be time and I could make it right with him.

She’s so wrapped in her thoughts that she’s holding the cigarette pack in the open, tapping one out with half the corner watching. Damn.

“Can I get one?”

“Huh?” she says, slow to recover.

“A smoke?”

“Hmmm,” she grunts, giving it up.

“Hey Fran …”

And another.

“Borrow one?”

And another still. This corner soaks up Newports like a dry sponge; she had to be a damn fool to be sitting out here with a whole pack in her hands.

“Yo, Fran …”

“Got-damn, Stevie, I done gave away half the pack.”

Her brother shrugs, wounded.

“Here,” says Fran, pulling out a last giveaway and putting the rest in her pocket. Stevie lights up off her own.

“Ronnie’s back,” he says.

That he is. Fran watches Ronnie Hughes and Michael Hearns roll up Fayette and park the Buick just across the street. Car doors swing open and the two men get out slowly, smiling, stretching like athletes on the sidewalk before walking back to the car trunk. Must be good, thinks Fran.

Ronnie opens up and the two men lift out the items on the very top of the pile—women’s dresses and men’s sportswear, the store tags flapping up in the winter wind. They’re standing there in the middle of Fayette Street, holding the shit up in the air by the curl of the hangers, displaying it with pride for the crowd at Mount and Fayette. The day’s catch.

“Ain’t this a bitch,” says Fran, smiling.

Michael walks toward her, his arm extended, his hand gripping an evening dress as if it’s a five-pound bass. Fran notices the Macy’s label. Not bad at all, she has to admit.

“Look at you,” she says.

Michael grins. A breadwinner.

“We can sell this shit,” she assures him.

Already, her mind is a step ahead. Where to sell it. What to ask. What to settle for and what to take for her cut. Out here on Fayette Street, the party never ends.