“Be right back.”
He’s out the back door and into the alley, but it doesn’t matter which way he goes. It’s nearly noon and the shop is bustling from Monroe to Gilmor; he’s surrounded. He’s going to have to face it, wade through it, and emerge on the other side.
He heads up the alley toward Monroe Street, the shortest distance to the store. But walking past Blue’s house, he sees Pimp ducking under the busted rear door, looking like he’s flush. Gary wets his lips, pulls the Angel hat up, wipes at his brow. The snake hisses, cursing.
He makes it to Monroe, stepping out of the alley and into the beehive. Up the street, at Vine, it’s all Spider Bags, and down on Fayette Street, Death Row and the Pink Top vials are honey for another swarm of fiends. Gary watches with practiced eyes as those with short money look for hook-ups, as Fat Curt steers a couple of hungry souls down Vine Street, as Eggy Daddy sings the merits of the Pink Tops.
Gary rivets his eyes to the ground and pushes one foot, then the other down the pavement toward Pratt Street and the grocery. He’s soon past the liquor store, across Fayette, and heading down the hill. So far so good.
“Gah-ray.”
It’s Junie talking. Gary makes the mistake of lifting his head. Dope and coke are flying everywhere: touts taking orders, dealers handing off, other bodies on urgent missions flashing past. It’s in the air. He can smell it, taste it. And Junie’s got that Mike Tyson. The shit’s a bomb.
Gary’s hand, the one with the death grip around Hamilton’s throat, is coming alive, pulling itself out of his pocket, moving with a will all its own. I could tell her I got robbed. Or just not come home. Hang with Ronnie somewhere. Stay down on Fayette Street, give it a couple of days and she’d forget.
He looks at Junie’s face. A mask, the eyes dead.
No. He jams the offending hand deep into his pocket.
“Ain’t up,” he says, then pushes past, crossing Baltimore Street, gaining speed, past Blue’s son, Dontanyn, the last retailer in the line, before rolling downhill to the market.
Inside, he gathers the stuff, but dag, the prices are way high. He thinks about cutting the order. Maybe shave off a nickel. Tell her he got mixed up, or just drop the bag in the kitchen while she’s upstairs sleeping. It would be nothing to keep five and find a hookup with some other short money. Get ten, maybe twenty on the hype. That’ll work.
He’s trapped in the aisle, holding one box of Hamburger Helper, then two, then one again. He looks at the label. The stuff ain’t even good for you, too many chemicals. He stands there for a minute more, until the scales tip and he grabs both boxes and the taters, goes to the register and gives up a bill as crumpled as his spirit.
The way home is not the hero’s journey. He climbs Monroe Street, package in hand. He drags his lonesome ass past the touts, feeling weak. The snake spits out its contempt.
“What took you so long?” asks his mother.
He mumbles half an answer.
“Want to eat?” she asks him, her voice now soft.
Gary looks at her, sees that she knows. Maybe she knew the whole time. He wants to say something, to bring it home, but the snake seizes the moment instead.
“No, Ma,” he says, “I got to go out.”
DeAndre McCullough leans against the oversized concrete flowerpots outside the rec center doors, his demeanor on chill, his face tucked down inside the hood of his sweatshirt. R.C. is perched next to him on the steps, lacing and relacing his new Jordans, listening with growing impatience as DeAndre tells the tale. Boo is against the other flowerpot, half listening, half waiting with a broken fragment of the playground’s crumbling asphalt in his hand, watching for a rat to stick its head out of the discarded easy chair at the end of the alley.
“You was getting out the hack?”
“Right on Baltimore Street,” says DeAndre.
“Sheeeeet,” R.C. says. “We should call a meeting.”
DeAndre nods agreement.
“We should send a message,” adds R.C. “Go down there deep.”
“You see who it was?” asks Boo.
DeAndre shrugs.
“But, yo, Black, you was comin’ from the projects,” insists R.C. “You was down the hill where they always be. That’s why they took them shots at you.”
DeAndre nods agreement. He likes it when anyone calls him Black. He fashioned the street name himself, figuring that any real gangster ought to be able to fashion his own corner legend, rather than leaving such important matters to random chance. His family used to call him Onion, because when he was little his head had that particular shape. DeAndre hated Onion.
“I’m saying we should go strong,” adds R.C., warming to the idea. “Fuck them project niggers. They ain’t all that.”
It probably was the Lexington Terrace boys who took a shot at DeAndre on Baltimore Street, and by rights C.M.B. should mount up and march back down there in force. But DeAndre has other things crowding his mind; they all do since they started going off to sling drugs in ones and twos. Hard to raise a posse when the crew is scattered over a half-dozen corners.
“Must be them,” says Boo, chiming in late. “Or maybe those niggers from Stricker and Ramsay.”
“Boo, you stupid,” says R.C. “They ain’t gon’ be up on Baltimore Street. And, yo, half of them is white anyway.”
“So?” asks Boo, wounded. “Least I ain’t stupid like you, R.C. Least I go to school.”
“I go to school,” R.C. says, then catches himself before the other two dissolve in laughter. “Well, I will go to school soon as my mother gets me into Francis M. Woods.”
That’s the current theory on Richard Carter’s academic career. If he could only get out of Southwestern and into Francis Woods, then he’d turn it around, maybe get to the tenth grade before reaching the age of majority. It’s a fine theory, and there are appreciable differences between the chaos of the Terrordome, as the local kids call Southwestern, and the controlled anarchy of Francis Woods. But the contrast is relevant only if a student were to attend more than, say, two or three days a semester. R.C. always hits a shopping mall for the back-to-school fashion sales, then shows up looking right for the first day of class. After that, it’s back to the streets.
As for DeAndre, lately he’s been living in both camps. Since Rose Davis put him back on the rolls last month, he’s been making it down to Francis Woods for little more than half of his classes. He’s also been slinging enough of his Blue Tops on Fairmount to keep money in his pocket. Not as much as he’d like, of course—Tyrone Boice plucked him good when he tried to bring his vials up to Monroe Street—but enough to get by.
“What you say?” DeAndre asks, changing the subject.
“Huh,” says Boo.
“About the thing.”
“Yeah,” says Boo, throwing the asphalt chunk. Hitting the chair, missing the rat.
DeAndre waits for more of an answer. When none is forthcoming, he suppresses an almost overwhelming desire to smack Boo upside his head. He’s been trying to give Boo a little piece of his package on consignment, bring on a subcontractor and make a little more than he could make on his own.
“I’m sayin’ you’d get twenty-five,” DeAndre tells him.
“Twenty-five dollar?”
R.C. laughs loudly from the steps. “Boo, goddamn!”
“No,” says DeAndre. “That’s the split.”
“Oh yeah,” says Boo, nodding until silence descends on them.
DeAndre