The Corner. David Simon

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ