The Corner. David Simon

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ