McCullough wakes to the morning cold fully dressed and still weary from the night before. Slowly, he rolls sideways on the narrow mattress, leaving a worn blanket in the center trough where the springs have all but collapsed. He lets one arm fall over the higher edge of the bed and slowly opens one eye. Below and to the right of him on the baseboard, he catches the brown sheen of a cockroach and reaches under the bed. He comes up with his one of his mother’s shoes, firing it against the wall, missing by inches. The roach scurries off.
DeAndre closes his eyes, trying to regain sleep, but the noise from the old Zenith, which runs nonstop in this back bedroom, has grabbed his attention. He buries his face in the mattress, but he can’t help listening.
“Boy,” he mutters with contempt, sensing his younger brother at the foot of the bed. “You watch some stupid shit.”
DeRodd shrugs. “It was on when I got up.”
“That don’t mean you got to watch it.”
DeRodd says nothing. The dinosaur starts into his dinosaur song and DeAndre raises his head just high enough to glare at his brother.
“Barney ain’t shit,” he says finally.
“I’m not watching,” DeRodd insists.
“Off-brand, purple-ass dinosaur,” mutters DeAndre, swinging an open palm at the younger boy’s head.
“Ow,” says DeRodd softly.
DeAndre raises his legs slowly and drops first one, then the other over the edge of the mattress until he’s finally sitting up, rubbing both eyes with his hands. He can remember staggering up here about two in the morning with a cheesesteak from Bill’s; the wrapper is on the floor in front of him. He can remember that he had a good day down on Fairmount yesterday; money in his pocket and Boo owing him still more for the vials DeAndre fronted him. He can remember getting blunted up with Tae and Sean. In fact, he can remember pretty much everything; that business about weed making you forget things is all bullshit.
“Why ain’t you in school?” DeAndre asks.
“Saturday.”
DeAndre grunts. A good enough answer, but it’s not in him to give any eight-year-old the last word.
“You should go anyway.”
“Ain’t no school on Saturday.”
“You should go there and wait for Monday.”
DeRodd pouts and DeAndre swings again with an open hand. This time the younger boy is ready and ducks away.
“Where Ma at?” asks DeAndre.
DeRodd shrugs.
Stretching slowly, DeAndre rises and catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror above the dresser. The forest of short dreds that top his head Bart Simpson-style is crushed to one side by the night’s sleep; in profile, he looks like a coal black rooster. His hair is his most distinct ive feature, a detail that declares him unique in a neighborhood where image is everything.
Otherwise, he is a study in urban conformity, and within minutes, he is primed and dressed to match the set: a black puff ski parka left open to flap in the breeze, a thick blue and white flannel shirt worn outside oversized jeans that ride low on the hips, the requisite high-top Nikes that go for upwards of $125 a pair.
Running down the steps from the second floor, he digs one hand into the front pocket of his denims, pulling out a tight roll of twenties, tens, and fives. He pauses in the empty vestibule to count it off; four hundred twenty-five and some change, and for once it’s all there. Not like last weekend when he and the boys brought some girls to the vacant house up the block on Fayette. They smoked like ten bags of weed, and the next morning, DeAndre woke alone and hurting in his parents’ old bedroom, his gallery of pinups mocking him from all sides. When he checked his pocket that morning, it wasn’t seven hundred, but about three-forty on the roll. And DeAndre for the life of him couldn’t remember where it went. Weed? Girls? Or maybe someone waited for him to fall out on the mattress and then dipped into the bank.
He had slept in today. By the time he gets down the block and around the corner, it’s afternoon and the fiends—white boys coming north from Pigtown, those of his own hue rolling down the hill from Monroe Street—have collected into a loose, shifting crowd around the corner of Baltimore and Gilmor. Moving down the litter-blown block, he looks older than his fifteen years, outwardly confident in a way that teenagers seldom are. The wayward hairstyle is recognizable a block away, the clothes tailored to this season’s G-thang look, but nothing carries enough flash to attract unnecessary attention. No gold on the neck or hands to catch the winter sun—nothing that glimmers enough to attract stickup boys or that a knocker might take for cheap probable cause. By and large, the McCullough boy is a study in a lower key.
Arriving at the alley entrance to Fairmount, he takes stock of his real estate. This is mine, he thinks, watching the touts work the crowd. I made it happen. Ain’t no kid stuff, like that bullshit last summer when his crew tried their hand at slinging only to get plucked bad by the big boys.
For two years now, DeAndre and the others—Tae and R.C., Boo and Manny Man, Dinky and Brian and the rest—have been carrying themselves like a gang, calling themselves C.M.B. for Crenshaw Mafia Brothers, a name agreed upon after the fourth or fifth viewing of Boyz in the Hood at Harbor Park. So far, C.M.B. was something of a rump creation, sandwiched between the more established Edmondson Avenue Boys to the north and the Ramsay and Stricker crew down bottom. More lethal than all of them is the crew from the high-rise projects to the east. A five-tower nightmare at the western edge of the city’s downtown, Lexington Terrace has so many buildings from which to draw members that the Terrace Boys are always deep. Still, the C.M.B. contingent had Fayette Street to itself, and ever since they turned twelve and thirteen, the boys had been playing at gangster. Two years ago, that meant mostly street fights and dotting brick walls and asphalt with Crenshaw Mafia tags. Last summer, they stepped up a bit, stealing cars one after another for the joy of it or sneaking down to the Pulaski corners to try their hand at drug slinging. In any other world, it would be called criminal; on Fayette Street, it still amounted to casual misadventure. At Hollins and Pulaski, C.M.B.’ s initial foray on a corner ended comically enough, when their supplier waited until the summer’s last re-up, then disappeared on them with all their pooled profits.
Tae, R.C., and the others were still moaning about it, but DeAndre, at least, had been spared that disaster. Instead, he had spent the last half of the summer under the wing of a New Yorker, Bugsy by name, who saw promise in DeAndre and set him up with a sixty-forty split on packages of blue-topped coke vials. Working on consignment, DeAndre and a handful of others had gone big-time, opening up the old strip where the 1500 block of Fairmount Avenue runs into Gilmor.
Fairmount had been dead most of the last year, when Stashfinder and the other knockers hit it hard, chasing the action back up to Mount and Fayette, or down to the lower end by Baltimore and Stricker, leaving Fairmount to the ghosts. But it was still prime territory. Tiny Fairmount, a two-block alley street of rowhouses teeing into Gilmor, offered darkness and a warren run of side alleys and walkways. A tactical night mare for the knockers, it was ideal terrain for a young dealer working a ground stash. Of course, it was also a nice setup for the stickup boys, so that the likes of Odell or Shorty Boyd could jump on a whole crew, lining them up and taking every damn thing. But DeAndre would carry that; getting jacked now and again was, after all, a part of the game.
Fairmount had been slow going at first. He had to get the word out, draw the fiends in to sample his product. He and his cousin’s boyfriend, Corey, spent a lot of time out on the corner, working hard to get the shop up and running. The knockers had mostly moved on to other hot spots, but the stickup boys were a bitch, feeding in a frenzy once they discovered the new market. He got jacked once, and he lost a ground stash or two, but by and large, most of the profit was realized. In August, he got caught by a couple knockers with a handful of pills, but no matter—DeAndre played that, too, to his advantage, showing Bugsy the juvenile court papers and telling the dealer he got nailed with the whole bundle. Bugsy took it off the account; DeAndre then emptied the blue-tops into pinks and