Frag Box (10 page)

You hear the term “Rust Belt” a lot these days, but I don’t believe in it. A lot of the old factories along the Detroit River have moved out or just shut down, but Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant and GM’s Cadillac factory farther to the north are still cranking out shiny chrome-trimmed monsters, the railroads are still busy feeding the iron giant and hauling away its products, and the diners and bars and dance halls are full every night. Everybody works and plays. Everybody is singing Motown, and everybody is buying tickets to tomorrow. Life is good.

Pretty good, anyway. The folks who have good jobs work hard and get by. Those who can’t break into the unions or the decent housing, which mostly means blacks, don’t. They tend to be some of Uncle Fred’s best customers, since their chances in the normal world are rotten to none. Sometimes that translates into despair but just as often it morphs seamlessly into rage. And sometimes the two are hard to tell apart. When the heat goes up in the center city, there seems to be plenty of both.

There are neighborhoods where a white boy like me has no business wandering around on his own. And there are others where no kid of any color wants to let the sun go down and find him still on the street. That’s too bad, since a lot of my Uncle Fred’s customers are in those neighborhoods, and sometimes it’s my turn to help with the collections.

Besides the normal bookie business of taking bets on horse races and sports contests of all kinds, my uncle also sells tickets to the New York lottery, since Michigan doesn’t have one of its own. He lets me take the orders on the phone. I copy down the requested number and read it back to the caller, along with their name and address. When I’ve sold twenty or so, I call one of half a dozen numbers for our layoff men in New York itself, and he calls me back a little later to confirm that he’s bought the actual tickets. We charge our customers five dollars for a fifty-cent ticket, don’t mess with the quarter or dollar tickets at all. In the unlikely event that the customer’s number actually hits, we split the winnings right down the middle. I’ve only seen that happen once, and I was dumbfounded to hear an out-of-work upholsterer’s helper bitching about only getting thirty-five thousand dollars.

On a good day, when nobody wastes my time with a lot of chitchat, I can sell a hundred and twenty tickets, make a record of who I sold them to, and get the actual tickets bought, some thousand or so miles away. My pay for all that is ten percent of the markup, or forty-five cents a ticket, which translates to fifty-four dollars a day.

That is just purely one hell of a lot of money for a teenage kid, more than enough for me to have my own place, upstairs over a rundown hardware store on the near West Side. Fred calls it “a two-room flop, upstairs over a used paint store,” but it’s a big deal for me. I don’t intend ever to go back to high school or to my mother’s house up on Seven Mile, with its floating array of boyfriends whom I refuse to call stepfathers. I intend to be a mojo numbers man, just like my uncle.

We have several freelance contractors working at collecting the five bucks a pop from all those customers, and I don’t know what their cut is, except that it’s more than mine. But that’s okay, because their job is tougher.

Once or twice a week, Uncle Fred tells me to tag along with one or another of them, just to see all the facets of the business close up, practice for the day when I’m big enough to pinch-hit at any position. For those trips, I don’t get paid anything. It’s just on-the-job training. I carry a sturdy leather gym bag to put the money in and a baseball bat to protect it with. Uncle Fred doesn’t let me carry a gun.

I usually go with a big Irishman about twice my age, named Gerry Phearson, or Jerp for short. He’s ten feet tall and has baseball mitts for hands and bulldozers for feet, and everybody says he looks like John Wayne with stringy red hair. They also say that if you get him mad enough, he can kick a hole in a cinder-block wall or bite the numbers off a billiard ball.

He likes me. When people say, “Hey Jerp, who’s riding shotgun for you today?” he will tell them, “Me little brother, boyo, and don’t you be giving him no grief, or I’ll let him break your kneecaps for you.” We drive around in a beat-up ’59 Mercury and park any damn where we like.

The heat wave this July is brutal, and we have all the windows down and wet rags on our heads. Swamp Arabs, Jerp calls us. I think we look so totally stupid, we’re cool. We’re overdue to collect on about a hundred bucks worth of tickets up in Highland Park, where the first big Ford plant was once, and over on the near West Side. There were some riots over there a couple nights ago, and we stayed away from the area to let it cool down. On Twelfth Street, right in the heart of the neighborhood, the cops made an early morning raid on a blind pig, and a hundred or so drunk customers decided they would rather attack the cops than stand around waiting for a fleet of paddy wagons to show up and take them off in chains. To hear the news reports, it turned into a major war.

But we’ve had blowups before, between angry blacks and angrier white cops. The situation ought to be cool enough to touch by now.

Rounding the corner off Grand Boulevard onto Dexter, I can see that cool is exactly what it is not. A huge crowd of blacks, mostly young men, is swarming over the street, while behind them, buildings are going up in flames, one after another. We might have another ten minutes before the whole sky is covered with dirty brown-black clouds and the cinders come raining down everywhere. Off to the east, I can see the flashing lights of some fire trucks, but it’s obvious they’re never going to get through the mob.

There’s gunfire now, too. I can’t tell if any of it is aimed at us, but there’s a lot of it.

“Jerp, I hate to be the one to say it, but maybe we should get the hell out of here.”

“We’ve still got collections to make, lad. It sets a bad precedent, letting a fish off the hook over a little thing like a riot.”

“What about the guns?”

“Which ones?”

Which ones? Is he crazy? “The ones that seem to be going off all around us just now.”

“Ah, those. Sort of like Sunday in Belfast, isn’t it? Makes a body homesick, it does. Now, if one of our customers had a gun, that might be different. I’d have to make him eat it, wouldn’t I? But these guns have nothing to do with us at all, at all. The jungle people are shooting up their own, most likely. Or they’re shooting the cops, which of course would be a terrible shame.”

I can see there’s no point talking to him. He’s got himself set on showing me how unflappable he is, I guess, and once he makes up his mind, you might as well argue with a statue. Typical Irish, my Uncle Fred would say. Rock solid from the ground up, right through the brain.

I wish I felt as cool as he acts. I’ve got a prickly little animal running around in my gut that says the day is going to get very ugly before it’s finally over.

The crowd gets closer and larger, and Jerp steers the big Merc’ over the curb and through a trash-strewn parking lot as some rocks and bricks start to hit the car and a lot of guys are swinging big sticks and surging toward us. Behind us, a Molotov cocktail goes up with a dull “whoof,” maybe meant for us, maybe not.

Jerp is picking up speed now, despite people swarming in on all sides. Wire grocery carts and trash cans go flying off the front bumper and into the crowd, as he tries to get enough momentum up to crash through the cyclone fence at the back of the lot.

A metallic screech, a lot of jolts and tearing noises, and we’re through, heading down a wide industrial alley. All around us, black men are grabbing sticks or metal bars, pounding on the car as we plow through them. Occasionally we bounce a sweaty black body off the grille.

“Lock your door, lad.”

He doesn’t have to tell me twice.

More gunfire. Loud, hoarse barks that I recognize as shotgun blasts, and other higher-pitched popping that must be pistol fire. A few bodies down on the pavement now, some of them in spreading pools of blood. We sure as hell didn’t shoot them. I wonder who did.

If all that weren’t enough, now we have machine gun fire. Tracer rounds are stitching a line across the second story fire escapes of a clapboard tenement down the street. The neon line of bullets comes first, the brrt-brrt noise a second or two later, sounding muffled. The shooter is a long way away, maybe as much as a mile. He’s shooting at something else altogether, something we will never see, or at nothing at all. But what goes up must come down, and unfortunately, it’s still lethal.

“Herman, lad, do you know how to drive?”

“Yeah, sure.” The car has an automatic transmission. How hard could it be? I look over at him and I see blood coming out of his mouth and the big, meaty hands white on the steering wheel.

“Jesus, Jerp—”

“Just grab the wheel, will you? You don’t have to worry about the brake, because we’re not stopping. Head for downtown. The old Michigan Central train depot. The place has been next thing to abandoned for years. We ought to be able to find a place inside there to lay low for a while and maybe stash the money. Or if we can’t, we’ll take a train out. If we try to get back to the office with the dough and run into the cops or the National Guard, they’ll relieve us of it, and that’s a certainty.”

He lets go of the wheel and floors the gas pedal, and I suddenly find out that steering really isn’t very tough at all, if you don’t care what you hit.

We’re back on Grand, heading east and south, the big engine pushing us up toward seventy. I blow the horn at anything that gets in our way, bounce off a few busses and cars, and mostly aim right down the center of the street, ignoring all the traffic lights. Jerp is breathing in gasps now and clutching a red handkerchief to his side, but he’s still conscious and his eyes look clear.

Two blocks ahead, I see a wall of khaki. The National Guard or the Army, hundreds of them or maybe thousands, with trucks and jeeps, are blocking off the street, advancing en masse.

“Ease off, Jerp. I think we’re okay now.”

“With that lot? Bollocks. First we have to stash the money.”

“It’s only money, Jerp. There will always be money. We have to get you—”

“It’s the responsibility, is the thing. We lose somebody else’s money, we’re no better than that riffraff we just left. Find a place to stash it, I say!” He’s screaming through clenched teeth now, and again I see there’s no point in arguing.

“We’re not too far from my place,” I say. “I’ve got a secret stash in the basement of the hardware store that we—”

“Go for it, lad!”

I make the corner onto Hobson on two wheels, and Jerp eases off on the gas a bit and lets me maneuver into the side streets.

“Almost there,” I say. “How are you holding up?”

“Alls I need is a short beer and a shot of Bushnell’s, and I’d be singing ‘Molly Malone.’ Shut up and drive.”

Three more turns and we’re there. Jerp can’t seem to find the brake pedal, so I throw the shifting lever into Park. The transmission makes a noise like a mechanical pig being slaughtered, but finally the rear wheels lock up and we skid to a stop in the alley behind the hardware store.

“Quick now, lad.”

As if he had to tell me. The streets are deserted here, but I can hear shouting mobs not that far off. I grab the gym bag, pile out of the car, and use my key to let myself into the service entry of the store. Lights off, everything deserted. I wonder where Mr. Holst, the owner, would go, if he decided to evacuate his own neighborhood. Where would anybody go?

Down in the basement, I open up the fire door on the old monster coal furnace that has long ago been replaced by the new gas-fired Lennox. I stick my body half inside the fire chamber, pick up the edge of the sheet of asbestos board that covers my own personal money stash, and throw the gym bag under it. As I shut the door and sprint for the stairs, I hear gunfire out in the alley.

Oh, shit. We cut it too fine.

Maybe I should have brought Jerp inside with me. Maybe I still should. Go ask. But my feet aren’t moving. It feels safe in the basement. And I am so very afraid. I dither and hesitate and wait, for what, I don’t know. And then I see the smoke at the top of the stairs. The bastards have torched my building.

Stairs three at a time, kick the back door open again, don’t bother with turning out the lights. The deadbolt will relock itself, if there’s anything left to protect. Just be sure you’ve still got your key.

Back outside, the sunlight is blinding. I put my hand up to shield my eyes, just in time to catch a blow from a club. Jesus, it feels like my forearm is shattered. With my other hand, I swing the baseball bat, lashing out blindly in all directions. I catch at least one set of shins and maybe a head or two, and I’m able to clear a little free space around myself.

Everything looks black and white but slowed down now, like an old movie being run in slow motion. I must have a lot of sweat in my eyes, because it’s getting hard to focus.

Down the street, somebody yells, “Hey man, they broke open Ullman’s!” That would be the neighborhood liquor store. The mob surges that way and loses interest in me. I make a final clearing swing or two with the bat and head back to where I left Jerp and the car.

Neither of which is there anymore.

What the hell?

He was hurt too bad to drive off himself, but if somebody was just boosting the car, wouldn’t they have dumped him out first? I climb the steel fire escape from my own pad, to get a better look over the crowd, but even so, car and Irishman are absolutely, totally gone. And as I perch there, they are joined by my pad, my building, my stash. And all my dreams. The building is going up so fast, the flames are already scorching my back.

I bound back to ground level and fight my way through the fringes of the crowd to some fairly clear street to the south. Then I start to make my way back toward downtown, running from one hiding place to another. The old Michigan Central train depot, Jerp had said. If he was capable of moving under his own power at all, that’s where he would go, and that’s where I should go, too.

Get there before dark, though, boyo. If you don’t, you’re just as likely to be killed by somebody inside the building as out.