The Corner (52 page)

DeAndre nods and backs away from the counter, listless in his movements. “You … um … you think I can get my uniform and start work tomorrow?” he finally offers.

At last, the manager seems to sense more fear than menace from this manchild. Suddenly charitable, she tries to put him at ease. “First we have to have the interview, then we’ll talk about when you start. Understand?”

DeAndre nods.

“And, young man,” she says, half smiling, “we’re going to have to talk about that hairstyle.”

DeAndre manages to nod at that as well.

The following day, he’s late getting across town, arriving at the restaurant a little after two-thirty. Though a delay of an hour and a half is fairly punctual by corner standards, DeAndre understands that he’s already testing the manager’s patience. Still, he can’t bring himself to conjure an excuse or—even less likely—an apology. He saunters to the counter wearing baggy shorts and a tank top, his Nikes unlaced, as if to declare that it makes no difference, that the world can take him or leave him.

But inside, he’s churning. Inside, he knows that today he will be judged. In a moment or two, the manager will stare him down and size him up and render a verdict as to whether he’s worthy enough to flip burgers and salt fries. For all the street-corner arrogance that DeAndre McCullough can project, the fear inside him is much the same as for any adolescent. In a moment or two, he’ll be made to answer questions, to state his needs, to ask someone from the external world for a chance.

He waits like a condemned man, staring down at his warped reflection in the silver sheen of the counter, waiting for the girl at the register to finish serving a customer. He looks past her, counting heads in the kitchen area, strangely gratified to see that the manager isn’t around.

“Can I help you?”

“Manager here?” His voice is a mumble.

The cashier points out into the restaurant area, where the woman is seated at a table, paperwork spread before her. A young girl is sitting
opposite, hands in her lap, ankles crossed. The girl is talking; the manager is nodding her head.

DeAndre takes a few steps toward the woman, catching her eye. She looks from the young girl to check her watch.

“You’re late,” she says.

DeAndre nods.

“Well, you’ll have to wait until I’m finished here.”

He backs away, finding himself against the condiment counter. Breathing deep, he scans the ebb and flow of walk-in business, watching the manager out of the corner of his eye. The girl says something and the manager smiles. DeAndre paces a bit, until after a few minutes, the crowd thins, leaving him nearly alone in front of the counter. He feels foolish and exposed; the fear he’s been holding down breaks free.

“Can I take your order?” asks an employee.

It’s a heavyset boy this time, working the middle register.

“Yeah,” says DeAndre, stepping forward. “Double cheese. Small fry. Medium Coke.”

“Is that here or to go?”

“To go.”

And when the food slides across the counter, he does.

“Let’s go,” says Tony.

“Awright then,” Gary agrees.

Lump just nods.

As with all great journeys, it begins with a simple willingness, with an abiding faith in the unknown. Treasure and glory are not for the faint of heart; a crusade requires good knights of the realm. With his California Angels brim pushed low and a satchel of metaling tools gripped in his hand, Gary McCullough is on the road to Jerusalem. He and his two confederates are going to take off the Baker Street scrap yard.

It means traveling beyond the pale of the Fayette Street fiend, north beyond the expressway, beyond Edmondson Avenue and Lafayette, extending their hustle. It means doing deeds in Rosemont, the largest stable enclave of homes in the Western District and a neighborhood with no strong drug corners closer than its edges. The residents there are mostly home owners, more likely than not to mark the comings and goings of strangers or to call the police on a guess. The police, too, are more likely to come when called.

For Gary and Tony and Lump, lumbering down Lexington, trailing
two empty shopping carts, the very idea is fat with risk. But the bottom end of the west side—the area closest to United Iron and Metal and the other area scrap yards—has by now been picked clean of copper and aluminum; too many scavengers working too many days have reduced the metal game south of the expressway to short-money scraps. For want of more valuable stuff, many harvesters are now tearing radiators and cast-iron sinks out of vacant houses, trying to make four or five dollars on bulk weight alone. Above the expressway and Edmondson is still virgin territory, though, and Tony Boice’s brother had told him of an unwatched and seemingly unmanned scrap yard, a Sutter’s Mill of old aluminum, copper, and cast iron that backed up against the railbed near the Baker Street underpass. Tony had been there once, creeping out with $30 worth of clean aluminum siding. If they could find it again, plunder it, and make their way back south, they would surely arrive at the scales on McPhail Street or down at United Iron with so much good weight that not even the Engineer, with his train of carts, could deny them their due. And if they did it once, they could always go back and do it again.

Gary’s head spins with possibilities as the trio turns up Warwick and waits for the light at Franklin. They cross quickly—Gary and Lump each with a cart, Tony in front like an Indian scout—and continue north on Bentalou. After Edmondson, they’re beyond the most blighted blocks, easing into a neighborhood of colored window awnings and plastic porch furniture. They rattle past the bus shelter, nodding generously to the older women who wait with shopping bags for downtown routes.

Near Winchester Street, Gary pulls up his cart, takes off his hat, and wipes his forehead. He’s breathing hard, his asthma choking him in the heat of late June. He leans on the handle of the cart, looking over at the garden work adorning a half-dozen of the Bentalou rowhouses.

“That’s nice,” he says to no one in particular.

“Huh?” says Lump.

Gary points to a rose-covered trellis. “It’s beautiful. The way they got the roses fixed up.”

Lump says nothing and looks up the block at Tony, who has stopped short of the corner. Gary steps away from the cart to get a closer look.

“C’mon,” Lump says, “we almost there.”

Gary nods vaguely, still taken by the roses. Finally, he turns away, wiping the sweat from his face and returning the Angels cap to his head.

“Okay, Boss.”

They power up the rest of the hill, past Carver High, turning at Baker
Street, where gravity takes over and the carts run gently down the slope. An old woman watches them pass from her front porch. Gary nods and smiles, trying hard to make the shopping-cart caravan seem like normal business.

Tony points to a patch of scrubs and trash, just off the sidewalk beneath the railroad overpass. “Carts stay here,” he says.

They shove the metal carts deep into undergrowth, then scramble up the dirt path to the top of the railbed. From there, it’s a couple hundred yards, maybe more, down the Conrail tracks, and then another forty feet through brush and vines and thorns. They’re pushing through a jungle in ninety-degree heat, with insects jumping all over them. Gary looks down at his hand in time to see a tick crawling for the soft skin between his thumb and index finger.

“Dag,” he says, flicking the bug away.

“This is fucked up,” says Lump.

“You gotta pay to play,” Tony assures them.

“We gonna carry all of it back through this?” asks Gary. He feels something on the back of his neck and gives an involuntary shiver. “We workin’ for real.”

“We soldiers,” Tony assures him.

“We Vikings,” says Gary, laughing.

They reach the back fence of the lot and find the hole from the last time Tony made the run. One by one, they crawl through and emerge in a metal harvester’s heaven. Stacks and stacks of old batteries, aluminum siding, aluminum trim, storm doors—and no one guarding any of it, not even the proverbial junkyard dog. Gary walks around the scrap piles like an art collector at the Louvre, admiring this, coveting that.

“Ho, it’s the Big Rock Candy Mountain,” he says.

“I told you it was right,” says Tony, proud.

Lord. If they could levitate this yard and deliver it whole to United Iron or to the scales on McPhail Street, they’d be instantly rich. More than rich, they’d be dead from more dope and coke than any fiend needs.

“Get them batteries first,” says Tony.

George on McPhail Street pays a dollar apiece for old car batteries, so with each of them carrying three stacked batteries on their sortie from the yard, they’ve quickly liberated the rough equivalent of a blast. After that first run, they decide to divide the labor: Tony and Gary will bring the weight out of the yard and then haul it down the railbed to the overpass. Once they’ve had their fill, they’ll roll the batteries down
the dirt slope to Lump waiting on the sidewalk below. Lump will load the carts.

It’s hellacious work, with the midday sun beating down and the heat radiating up from the gray-blue stone and creosote ties of the railbed. Gary and Tony trudge back and forth, carrying the batteries two-to-a-trip, ankles twisting as the railbed stones slip beneath their jump boots. In the yard, there’s the vague fear of being watched, and in the jungle, there’s the insect swirl—gnats, mosquitoes, and who knows what else buzzing around their eyes and ears, drawn by the sweat. But the stack of batteries that takes shape atop the overpass is gratifying. Twenty, then twenty-six, then thirty-two batteries—followed by some long pieces of aluminum trim.

“Enough for this run,” says Tony.

With his breath coming in wheezes, Gary agrees, though there is a part of him that wants to keep going back. Get more while the getting is good.

“Heads up.”

They begin rolling the car batteries down the dirt slope one at a time, giving Lump a chance to weight them evenly on each cart. But thirst and heat make for impatience, and after a dozen or so batteries, Tony gives the battery pile a kick, sending four or five down at once.

“Ho now,” says Lump.

One battery catches a corner and goes bounding left, glancing off the overpass abutment and landing hard on the sidewalk below. Up top, Gary and Tony wince at the shriek that follows.

“Uh oh,” says Gary.

All is silence, save for the sound of Lump trying to force some kind of mumbled apology out of his mouth. Tony steps back, but Gary goes down the slope far enough to see a well-dressed woman with two young ones in tow.

“People walk here,” says the woman, outraged.

By the look of things, the wayward battery had just missed landing on someone’s head. Gary looks at Lump, who looks back blankly. It’s up to Gary to put things right before the woman goes off to hail a police; he pulls the brim from his head and ventures halfway down the slope.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry about that. I really am very, very sorry. It just got away from us and we weren’t expecting …”

“Be more careful,” she says, still frightened. “You could kill someone.”

“You’re right. You’re right. We’ll be careful.”

She shakes her head, disgusted, then grabs both of her charges by the hands to walk them to the opposite side of the street.

“Man,” says Gary. “You shoulda said they was coming.”

“Crept up on me,” Lump says, shrugging. “Didn’t see’m.”

In fear that the police will soon be arriving, they roll the rest of the batteries at full speed. Lump has most of the batteries in one cart; the rest are paired with the aluminum to fill the other.

“We outta here,” says Tony, following Gary down the slope.

But Lump has paused just long enough to feel something on his leg. And Gary, too, has a feeling on his neck.

“Tony, check this out.”

Gary bows his head for an inspection. Tony pulls off one tick, then another. He looks over at Lump, who has his pants leg rolled up.

“You got ’em too?”

“They got us, you mean.”

Suddenly the caper is on hold, with the three of them pulling off shirts and socks and shoes. Gary finds a tick on the back of his leg, pries it loose and crushes it between his nails. “Parasites,” he says, “livin’ off someone else’s blood.”

Minutes pass before they’re dressed again and ready for the road home. The first cart proves so heavy that Baker Street might as well be Everest. It takes all three of them to bring that weight up the short hill to Bentalou; Lump waits there with it while Gary and Tony return for the second cart.

Before long, they’re a wagon train again, rolling southbound, with Gary and Tony struggling to keep the heavy cart away from parked cars and other obstacles. Soon they’re crossing Lafayette, then Edmondson, then Franklin Street over by the McDonald’s.

“Thirsty,” says Lump.

“Let’s get down to the bar,” Tony tells him.

But on Warwick Avenue, where the road slopes and turns, they lose control of the heaviest cart, watching helplessly as it careens into the fender of a Mercedes-Benz parked outside a body shop. Metal hits metal like a thunderclap and two batteries bounce off the top and into the street.

“Dag,” says Gary, looking around.

“More work for the body and fender man,” says Tony.

They put their weight to the front of the cart, prying it loose from the Mercedes, setting it back on course. “Jus’ keep it down the middle,
Mo,” says Gary, assuming the role of riverboat pilot. “Steady as she goes.”

They’re off again, impelled by the promise of a cold forty from the bar at Warwick and Baltimore. They each ante up change and Gary goes inside, leaving the other two guarding the weight. Minutes later, they’re sitting on the curb, the carts drawn up close, when a police cruiser idles down Baltimore.

“He pullin’ up.”

“Shit.” The cruiser slows in front of them. Gary stands. It’s a white patrolman unknown to the trio.

“What’s in the bag?” asks the cop.

“Beer,” says Gary. No point lying. The paper bag is wordlessly invoked.

“Pour it out.”

Tony looks at Lump, who looks over at the haul of stolen metal. They’re two blocks from the McPhail Street scales.