King of the Corner (13 page)

“The little Black Book,” Ance said. “I don’t know if the cocksucker could even read.”

Brown & Kilmer had worked miracles with the shrunken corpse Doc had seen in the Independence Motel a few days earlier, filling in the caved cheeks and doing something with putty where the flesh had puckered to the bone. The temple wound was only a faint outline, filled in and covered with makeup. The rest was paint and lighting; a fixture in the top of the arch over the dais shed dusky pink light on the deceased, eliminating harsh shadows and softening the atrocities of years and drugs. Doc thought he looked better than he had in recent newsreels.

Ance echoed his thoughts. “Cashing in was one smart career move. I just wish he’d done it before he got so far into my wallet.”

Mourners were still filing in. Most of the latecomers were young, in their late teens and early twenties, and the nearest most of them had to a suit was a matching black leather jacket and pants with skinny Michael Jackson neckties. The haircuts ranged from conservative flattops to geometric designs razored into their heads. Their talk was noisier than the earlier arrivals’ but less raucous than it would have been on the street. There was something about the presence of a dressed and painted corpse that knocked the edge off people.

The largest group had formed around a chair in the front row by the aisle. This was occupied by the elderly woman Doc had seen entering the building when he was looking for a place to park. She sat with her ankles crossed and her hands folded in her lap, answering remarks politely but without looking up. The flowered hat, set on a pageboy that was too straight and too dark to have grown on her head, was the brightest thing about her. Her tailored suit was ash rose and she had on plain black pumps and glasses with heavy black rims that Doc suspected had been selected to cover the crepe under her eyes. She looked seventy. She could just as easily have been ninety.

“Beatrice Blackwood,” said Ance when Doc asked about her. “After Mother Waddles and Alcina Lilley she’s just about the most respected black woman in this town. Her whorehouses were cleaner than most of the restaurants.”

“She’s a madam?”

“Was. Well, halfway; word is she’s semi-retired, sold all her cribs and massage parlors and comes in a couple of times a month on a salary basis to make sure nobody’s skimming too much. Place you got your tie straightened in yesterday? One of hers.”

“I thought you said it belonged to the mayor.”

“I said the feds think that. Anyway she sold it along with all the rest. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

The group was gathered in a kind of ragged reception line, each person taking her hand and saying something to her in obsequious tones as if she were the widow. Doc and Ance took their place behind the well-upholstered trousers of a man Doc was sure he recognized as a city official or a leading businessman or a minister he had seen a few times on local television.

When the overstuffed man stepped out of the way, Ance moved forward and spoke to the woman. Doc wasn’t paying attention to the words. He was watching the way she didn’t offer her hand, sheathed in a gray kid glove, until she heard his voice, the way he reached over to take the hand, and the way her heavy-lidded eyes, magnified behind the thick glasses, remained fixed on the middle distance between them, not lifting to meet his gaze. Doc wondered how much she could see. Perhaps Ance was just a shadow between her and the light.

“Maynard, how long has it been?” Her speech was youthful and almost musical, the consonants crisp. Jamaican? “Contributing to the delinquency, wasn’t it?”

“Five counts. Four girls and the queen, straight flush. Fifteen thousand for each of them, sixty for you. I was down to bread-and-butter sandwiches that month.”

“Don’t complain, you got back every penny. Beatrice never stiffed anyone. How much did Wilson beat you out of?”

“Fifty.”

“That boy. I could have told you he was a bad risk.”

“This is Doc Miller. He works for me.”

Her grip was surprisingly strong. “I hope he’s paying you. Maynard wouldn’t do anything he asks his people to do.”

Doc said he was pleased to meet her. She smiled, showing a perfection of teeth not found in nature, groped, and laid a hand on Ance’s wrist. “Come see Beatrice after she gets the cataracts off. Bring this charming boy with you. I’m going in next week.”

“It’s a date.”

They stepped away. “You’ll be old a long time before you meet another woman like her,” Ance said. “She delivered thirty thousand votes to the mayor last year.”

“And they still arrested her?” Doc asked after a moment.

“That was three elections ago. It takes a couple of terms in office to find out where to oil the machine. Oh, they crack down from time to time, to keep the whores from going out and stopping traffic, but those misdemeanor pops are petty cash, and they’re a lot cheaper than breaking in a new administration. So she gets out the vote.”

Ance had been right about the casual timing. At 2:45 guests were still arriving, and the bruiser in the black suit who had greeted them at the door was setting up a tripod at one end of the casket bearing a blowup photograph of Wilson McCoy inside a black wreath, a shot Doc remembered from a period poster of the young commando in the black beret and fatigue uniform of the Panthers with gloved fist raised and a predatory light in his eye. Another black suit brought in a lecturn and stood it in front of the first row of chairs. The hum of conversation began to level off. Doc and Ance found seats in the back row near the curtain.

One of the young men in black leather sat down next to Doc. “Excuse me, did I hear somebody say you’re Doc Miller? The ballplayer?”

He was a lean youth sprouting a silky moustache. On either side of his head a barber had shaved quarter-inch squares set corner to corner in an elaborate checkerboard. There was no hostility in the young man’s expression, only curiosity. Doc admitted he had played ball. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the haircut.

“I knowed it! I cut school and snuck into the park to see you pitch to the Brewers. It was a doubleheader, and you come on in the ninth both times. My mama whomped the shit out of me when she found out, but it was worth it.”

“The only time I relieved back to back against Milwaukee we lost both games.”

“Wasn’t your fault. Petry went all to hell in the sixth inning of the first game and Kirk Gibson choked with the bases loaded in the top of the eighth in the second like the motherfucker always done till he went to California. You walked Robin Yount in the first game. Nobody else got past you.”

“You must’ve been what, twelve years old?”

“Ten. Epithelial Lewis. My friends call me Needles.” He stuck out a hand that looked too big for his wrist.

Doc took it “You play, Needles?”

“I catch some out on Belle Isle. First base too, when it’s open, but I’m better behind the plate. This here is Yarnell and Creed; they’s some of the ones I play with.”

Doc stretched his neck to nod at the two men who had sat down on the other side of Needles. Yarnell shaved his head. Creed wore his hair in dreadlocks and sported a diamond on the left side of his nose. Doc was pretty sure all three were M-and-M’s. He was about to ask them what positions they played when the lights came up.

Actually it was just one light, a bright one on a stand erected by the News 4 cameraman, standing to the side of the curtained entrance supporting the camera on one shoulder. The reporter Doc thought he recognized stood next to him holding a microphone. The object of their attention was the Reverend Somebody-or-Other—Doc never caught the name—from the Second Baptist Church, who donned a pair of Ben Franklin glasses to read from a Bible spread open on the lectern; something from Luke. The oration that followed was brief and entirely forgettable. Maynard Ance’s head slid forward after a minute and Doc wondered if he’d gone to sleep.

He wondered too why the Marshals of Mahomet had invited the press. He’d expected pyrotechnics, but so far Needles’ checkerboard and Creed’s diamond seemed to be it.

The minister finished speaking and the guests began to stir. Just then a woman came through the curtain past the cameraman and the reporter and walked up the aisle without looking right or left, not slowing or stopping until she came to the casket, where she placed a small bouquet on top of the closed half of the lid, paused for a beat, then turned and went out the way she had come. Doc got a good look at her then, a trim tall handsome black woman in a knee-length blue dress caught at the waist with a wide black belt, no other accessories, and straight hair tied behind her head. But for some pale lipstick she wore no makeup. She appeared to be in her middle thirties. She’d been gone a full second when the TV reporter seemed to come to life and went out after her, hesitating only to say something to the man with the camera, who followed him, leaving his light behind. Only then did the first of the mourners rise from his chair to turn and stare at the curtain.

“Shit.”

Doc looked at Ance, wide awake, who tilted his head toward the exit. “Alcina Lilley. Mahomet’s widow. Just when you think the show’s a bust.”

By Leon “Bud” Arsenault

(continued)

In 1968, when Loyola MacGryff was 65, she became determined to cheer her beloved Tigers to victory in person over the St Louis Cardinals in Detroit’s first World Series since 1945.

Opportunity knocked during the American League play-offs.

Confident that a lineup including Al Kaline, Jim Northrup, Stormin’ Norman Cash, and Willie Horton, together with a pitching staff headed by Denny McLain and Mickey Lolich, would lead the team to a pennant, Mrs. MacGryff entered a contest sponsored by Vernor’s Ginger Ale.

First prize? Two tickets to Game 2 of the Series.

Challenged to write an essay in 25 words or less entitled, “Why the Detroit Tigers and the Taste of Vernor’s are Unbeatable,” the Queen of Fandom, by then thrice a grandmother, declined all offers of familial assistance and locked herself in her house for two days, subsisting on coffee, doughnuts, and the enigmatic whispers of the Muse.

At length, from a Vesuvius of discarded sheets of crumpled notepaper, she excavated her masterpiece: an ode to coaches, catchers, and carbonation.

After laboriously two-finger-typing it on her old Remington, she sealed it up and sent it off, the best pitch in her repertoire.

And it was a strike! Within ten days, she received her tickets by return mail.

“Oh, it was a grand day,” rhapsodizes Mrs. MacGryff, who brought her daughter-in-law with her to the stadium. “We sat in the old green seats, you know, and I can still smell the sun and the old mustard stains on the fabric. It was especially sweet that day.

“Willie and Norm and Mickey all hit homers with men on. It was Mickey’s first home run in the majors—I almost caught it, but I forgot my glove that day, and the ball went through my hands and bounced up into the higher seats. We won, eight to one.”

But the glow of victory was short.

When the die-hard rooter returned to her old house, she found it empty.

In her absence, neighbors reported, a moving van had backed up to her front door and two men in coveralls had carried out furniture, rugs, appliances, even clothes, until all six rooms were as bare as that turn-of-the-century day her parents had moved in.

Acquaintances on the block expressed surprise that she was leaving the neighborhood after so many years.

Mrs. MacGryff had not won the Vernor’s contest; someone else had. The burglars, whom police surmised had local ties, took advantage of the scuttlebutt that Mrs. MacGryff had entered the competition, purchasing and sending her the tickets so they could work most of the day undisturbed.

After all these years the octogenarian is philosophical.

“If I had just caught Mickey’s home run ball it would’ve been worth losing all those family pictures and things.”

(to be continued)

O
KAY, SO BASEBALL WASN’T
like sex. Nothing was. What Doc felt when his hand closed around the small hard sphere, wrapped in soiled white leather rubbed shiny and held together with stitches as tight as old scar tissue (and stamped
Made in Taiwan),
wasn’t what he had felt when the blonde who called herself Lynda first placed her palms on his naked skin in the massage parlor. It just made him think of it. And the release when he wound up and followed through and the ball whistled over the plate and struck Needles Lewis’ mitt with a report like a muzzled shotgun wasn’t orgasmic. It was more like stepping off the bus, hot and tired and aching all over, in front of his own house after a long time away. It was a cold drink and a familiar bed and a broken-down pair of loose shoes all rolled up into one.

“Ball one!” bellowed Neal.

“Ball, hell! I split the plate.”

“Another inch lower and you would’ve.”

“You ought to clean the grease out of your eyes before you leave work.”

“Play ball,” Neal said.

Doc’s brother, who worked only a half-day Saturdays, had come to the empty lot just in time to umpire the game. Before that, Doc, young Sean, Sergeant Battle and his son Charlie Junior—a reedy youth in a flattop and Fat Boys sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off who looked older than his fourteen years—the three young M-and-M’s from the funeral parlor, and Jeff Dolan, who arrived last, had spent four hours raking the cans and broken bottles and other less identifiable trash into a big pile off the playing field. Battle, dressed comfortably but carefully in a gray sweatshirt without lettering, stone-washed Levi’s, and black Nikes, had hesitated when he saw the three Marshals, all of whom he had seen around 1300 during drug sweeps, but Doc had talked him into staying on condition that Needles, Yarnell, and Creed stand for a frisk with their hands on the roof of the sergeant’s Chevy parked at the curb. Battle relieved them of a clasp knife with a five-inch blade, a set of brass knuckles which the owner, Creed of the dreadlocks and nasal jewelry, claimed was a paperweight he carried for luck, and a hypodermic syringe.