The Corner. David Simon

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ game. In the security office, he’s reunited with Doug, who gives him a guilty look. They’re left to sit there in silence while papers are shuffled and bodies move around them. Watching it all from within the fog, Gary is dazzled by a voice, businesslike and droning, then a hand extending papers. Gary, clueless, takes the pen and signs away, then waits some more until the county police arrive and he’s in the back of a police wagon for the short run to the Wilkens lockup. There, he sits in a common holding area, wondering when he might see a court commissioner, and bargaining with the snake, trying to figure some way to make peace with the animal inside.

      He’s the very picture of abject poverty, at least until some tattooed white boy walks over, lifts his shirt, and tugs at an Ace bandage wrapped around his ribs. Three bags of dope fall to the ground and the white boy laughs at the expression on Gary’s face.

      He picks up one of the glassine bags and looks over in gratitude; the white boy seems Christlike, feeding the multitudes. No spike, so Gary breathes it deep into one nostril, then leans back to hear the white boy’s laughter and feel the snake backing away.

      A few minutes later, they give him his call. Gary handles the receiver gingerly, dreading the answer at the other end. He’s causing pain they don’t deserve, but he has to get out.

      “Ma … yeah, Ma,” he says. “I’m locked up … Out in the county, Ma. They got me locked up.”

      He winces visibly at his mother’s voice, seeing her sagging down at the kitchen table, imagining the prayers running around her head. He tells the tale haltingly, painting himself a victim. Miss Roberta listens to a story that Gary hears as feeble even as he tells it. Finally, she cuts him off:

      “Gary, what were you doing out there in the first place?”

      He doesn’t have an answer.

      “Oh Gary.”

      She promises to call his brother Ricardo, who is now off the corner and doing all right for himself, making money down at the crabhouse and on a second job out at Social Security. Cardy might help, but beyond that she can’t promise, telling Gary that money is tight, that she’ll talk to his father when he gets home. Gary hears that and swallows hard.

      “Ma, please,” says Gary. He’s begging finally, promising to change, get off the drugs, maybe get back his old job at the Point and do all the things he used to do. “Ma, I’m gonna make it up to you, I promise.”

      His mother reaches Ricardo, scrapes up the money and finds a bondsman, but Gary gets the bad news when he’s pulled out of the bullpen in the afternoon: He can’t be released by the county; he has a detainer from Baltimore city.

      An old assault warrant, the turnkey explains. Gary tries to remember. Assault? Who? He didn’t assault anyone. It doesn’t register until he meets the city fugitive detective, thumbing his way through the paperwork.

      “Says here, you hit, ah, Veronica Boice.”

      Ronnie’s revenge. Her trumped-up humble of an assault charge from when Gary cut her out of a blast. Dag.

      The next ride takes him downtown. It’s Gary’s first trip to the city jail, that tiered nightmare at the city detention center and state penitentiary complex on Eager Street. He’s out of his depth and he knows it.

      In the intake area, he unwinds slowly, his eyes trying to adjust. He’s in a barred confine littered with maybe a dozen men—some white strays, but mostly black—being processed in and out of the facility. From behind a screen, a lieutenant pulls his paperwork, takes his thumbprint, and points him in the general direction of the bullpen. It’s eighty bodies deep, a murmuring, stinking mob squeezed around a single metal toilet.

      Gary struggles for space, eventually squeezing into a spot along one wall. He slumps down, tuning out the noise, eyes capturing a verse or two lifted from Isaiah, another fragment of raging prophesy about sin and redemption. He’s barely digested that much when the guards send them out on the tier, into J-section, where a coterie of broke-down oldtime hustlers share space with some of the younger souls. Gary draws an old white gunner from South Baltimore as a cellmate, a veteran who has been jailing for years, who knows to keep a low profile.

      Soon enough, Gary knows it, too. He quickly gets a sense of the sharks, the kind you want to keep from, especially the crazed one in the cell directly across from him. Banging the bars, eyefucking anything that moves, the neighbor across the way spends the time talking to no one in particular, telling the world just how bad he is. Beyond him, though, J-section seems pretty tame.

      Next morning, they let them out on the tier a half hour before breakfast for a chance to move around, maybe get to a telephone. Today, though, the sharks are making all the calls, so Gary heads off to the mess hall and a chance to look into that blue chain-linked sky along the way. Breakfast is two thick slices of bread, two packets of jelly, and a cold boiled egg. Gary throws it all together as a sandwich and forces it down. Then it’s back down the funnel and back into that cell. Twice more like that and he can call it a day.

      He’s a novice here, jailing without a game face, genuinely incapable of the requisite brutality. No shank, no moves, no allies, no money, but he’s making it, discovering that the words of Islam he learned in an earlier life can be a key. In the afternoon of that first day, he joins the little prayer group that nestles in one cell, hearing the words, talking the talk, giving it some meaning. The regulars are receptive; Gary is carving out a little niche, getting some breathing space and a chance at the phone. His mother promises that they’ll have a paid bail on the city charge soon. And, most important, an old-timer in the section comes through with pills that manage to hold the snake at bay.

      A day more and Gary’s thinking he can be hard, like Gee or Drac or any of the corner gangsters. Hard like Ronnie, who can do a month in women’s detention standing on her head. Gary is showing them all up in his mind, showing them he can do what he has to, thinking these thoughts until the white boy shows up, a kid, really, but shaded a little too far toward suburban, with wispy blond hair. Anyone with a soul has to wince when they drop the kid in with the madman across the way.

      The kid sits at one edge of the metal bunk and looks across the aisle at Gary, who tries to give back a reassuring smile. Night comes on with the lights dimmed, the noise muted. Gary closes his eyes, but night never brings real silence to Eager Street. Screams, sobs, cursing, laughter punctuate the hours; in jail, you cry at night—at least you do if you’re still capable of crying. After a time, Gary gives up trying to sleep and slides back against the wall, staring into the dimness. Passing time.

      He catches a movement in the cell across the way. Gary thinks he sees the glint from a gold ring slicing through the air, smashing down into a sleeping form. He hears a whimper, then the ripping of fabric and flashes of white skin. And then, a shattering of sound, with the caged animal cursing over a piercing endless scream that banks off the bars and echoes down the tier. Something is tossed from the cell; Gary squints in the darkness until his eyes make out what looks like the bloody stub of a broken fluorescent tube.

      The guards finally come and take the kid away. Gary closes his eyes, praying into that void, petitioning every power in the universe to take him home. No more dope, no more capers.

      For all that night and the next, he’s singing the redemption song, making plans for the better life to come, promising to wash the sin from his hands. He’s still talking like that on the day after, when the bail money is right and he’s gliding out from under the razor wire on Eager Street.

      He’s back on Vine the next day, breathing deeply, feeling good about himself, ignoring the chants of the touts, ennobled by the effort to make good on СКАЧАТЬ