Motor City Burning (24 page)

Edgar Vaughan was the Bledsoe brothers' second-to-last customer on their gun-selling spree when they first hit Detroit last spring. They did business in apartments, bars, stores, garages, barbershops and car lots, even in a couple of mosques and churches. Their customers wore berets, dashikis, smocks, box-back suits, greasy overalls, sharkskin, military camouflage and olive drab. They sold everything from books to burial insurance to used cars to Jesus. They ran numbers and they ran dope. They ranged from menacing to pathetic, from street toughs to dime-store Marxists, but they all had one thing in common: They all yearned to shoot white people, preferably cops.

Edgar Vaughan had led Wes and Willie into his cramped office at the back of the bookshop, where he served them coffee and half an hour's worth of quotations from Lenin and Chairman Mao and Malcolm X. Vaughan wore an Afro that had never been touched by a pick. He had a could-be-twenty, could-be-forty face, and when he ran out of rhetoric he asked Wes and Willie if they'd caught Rap Brown's speech at the Black Arts Conference. The brothers shook their heads. They'd been too busy selling guns.

“The cat was very right-on,” Vaughan said. “Got up there on the stage and said, ‘Motown, if you don't come around, we gonna burn you down!' Place went crazy. I'm tellin you, my brothers, this city's a tinderbox—and all it's waitin for's a match.”

“A tinderbox,” Wes said, shooting Willie an amused look. “And who got the match?”

“I believe you got the match right there, my brother.” Vaughan motioned at the duffel bag on the floor between Wes's feet.

“Ahh, of course,” Wes said, unzipping the bag and removing the pieces of a Winchester Model 70 rifle and laying them on the desk.

“That a sniper's rifle?” Vaughan said.

“Thas right. For brothers who don't like to be in the same zip code as the honky they fixin to shoot.”

Willie watched Vaughan's eyes get big as dinner plates while Wes snapped the gun together with crisp, expert movements. Willie guessed Vaughan had never held anything more dangerous than a copy of Mao's little red book.

“You want a scope too?” Wes asked, laying the assembled rifle on the desk.

Vaughan was staring at the gun like it was a poisonous snake. “How much?”

“Six for the gun, two for the scope. Them's fire-sale prices.”

“What kind of scope goes with it?”

“All I got left's a Unertl.”

“It any good?”

“The best. Good up to a thousand yards. Had a tendency to fog up in the jungle in Nam, but it shouldn't give you no trouble if you plan to use it in D-troit.”

“I plans to use it in D-troit.”

“Then you all set. That'll be eight hundred.”

Driving away from the bookstore after making the sale, Wes pounded the Buick's dashboard and roared, “Could you believe that nigger? All that shit about revolution and tinderboxes? I swear, they got more groups with more initials up here than a can a motherfuckin Campbell's alphabet soup—RAM, DRUM, UHURU, all this Marxist back-to-Africa, Swahili shit.”

“Yeah,” Willie said, “they actually believe buyin a mess a guns is gonna get whitey off their backs.”

“Fuck 'em. Long as they pays cash, I don't give a fuck what they believe.”

Their next and last customer was a slack-jawed blue gum who went by the name Kindu and lived on Wildemere in a filthy hole with cats and brimming garbage cans and a dank diaper smell to it. The two incense sticks burning on the kitchen table weren't doing a thing about that smell. Or the cockroaches.

Kindu had served in the First Cav in Vietnam and he was wearing his uniform to prove it—combat boots, dog tags, and the yellow shoulder patch with the black diagonal bar and the black horse's head. At least he knew guns. He wanted an M-16 and was disappointed to learn that all Wes had left was a pair of AK-47s, clunky Russian guns which, Wes assured him, would do in a pinch. Wes and Kindu chatted about banana clips, hollow points, hand loads and a lot of other things that meant nothing to Willie. He was nervous as a kitten, afraid of getting busted during their very last sale, the way the world worked.

When they finally closed the deal, Wes decided to stick around and celebrate by sampling some of Kindu's Thai reefer and Bali Hai wine. It had taken just three days to unload that trunkload of guns—all but the three Wes had stashed between his mattresses at the Algiers Motel and planned to keep for his “personal use.” He was flush, feeling good, ready to party. Willie begged off, said he was going to see Edwin Starr at the Twenty Grand that night and needed to swing by the Algiers and get cleaned up. In truth he just wanted to get far far away from that diaper smell and those guns and those two crazy niggers.

“Turn that up!” Louis suddenly cried.

Clyde had cut over to Woodward and they were passing between those two blocks of chiseled ice, the Public Library and the Institute of Arts, just as Otis Redding was bending into the whistling part on “Dock of the Bay.” Suddenly Willie was whistling along with Otis and Louis and Clyde, whistling as hard as he knew how, whistling until Edgar Vaughan and Kindu finally left him in peace. He even managed to forget the close call when that white cop had pulled him over right after he left Kindu's apartment.

Clyde docked the Buick in front of a place called the Seven Seas. As he climbed out, Willie looked across the street and was surprised to see his very first home-away-from-home in the Motor City, the Algiers Motel, where his brother had nearly become a statistic. Only then did Willie notice the sign. The familiar neon palm tree was still there, but they'd changed the name. The Algiers Motel was now the Desert Inn. Willie laughed out loud at this, at the vanity of believing it was possible to erase a disgrace by changing its name.

“The fuck you laughin at?” Louis asked, following Willie's gaze across the street.

“That's where my brother and I stayed when we first got to town last spring.”

“Why's that so funny?”

“They changed the name.”

“I seen that. Place is a shit hole no matter what they call it. You wasn't staying there during the riot, was you?”

“No, I'd moved out by then. Me and my brother both.”

“Lucky for you, son. Come on. Clyde wants to introduce you to somebody.”

16

C
ECELIA
C
RONIN WAS STANDING IN HER BEDROOM DOORWAY
drinking her third cup of coffee when Doyle's eyes finally popped open. It was past noon. From the way he looked around the room, sort of panicky, she could tell he didn't know where he was.

She said, “Coffee? Aspirin? Gun?”

He turned his head slowly, surprised to see her standing there. He said “Hi” in a small voice, like it hurt to talk.

“Can I get you anything?”

“Aspirin,” he croaked. “Water.”

She brought him a glass of ice water and three aspirins and sat on the edge of the bed. Propped on one elbow, he swallowed the aspirins and thanked her. “Whew,” he said, handing her the glass and returning his head gingerly to the pillow. “What ran over me?”

“Stroh's and John Jameson. I've never seen anything like it. You were fine one minute—telling me a hilarious story about a phone conversation you had with some redneck cop in Alabama—and the next minute two busboys were helping me pour you into my car.”

“So you drove me here from the Riverboat?”

“I wasn't about to let you drive.”

“And this is . . . your bedroom?”

“Correct.”

“Jesus. I'm sorry. . . .”

“No need to apologize. You do a great southern accent. But there's something I gotta tell you, Detective Doyle.”

He frowned.

“You snore like a chainsaw when you're drunk. I finally had to go sleep on the sofa.” She laughed and brushed the hair off his forehead. His frown disappeared. “You poor thing. You think a Bloody Mary might help?”

“You got any Vernor's?”

Half an hour later Doyle was halfway through his second can of Vernor's ginger ale and his first cup of coffee, sitting at the glass-topped table in the dining nook with his back to the big blue sky. He had no interest in how pretty Windsor, Ontario, looked this morning.

After he got down a soft-boiled egg and two pieces of toast, Cecelia said, “You got plans for the day?”

“I was thinking I might swing by Detroit Receiving for a blood transfusion.”

“I've got a better idea.”

An hour later they were on a bench in the Garden Court at the Institute of Arts, gazing wordlessly at Diego Rivera's “Detroit Industry” frescoes. Frank was lying on his back, using Cecelia's left thigh as a pillow. He looked content lying there, like he might actually survive this day.

They were surrounded on all four sides by frescoes that depicted the entire cycle of human life in the industrial age, from the germination of a cell to the brutal act of turning minerals into machines. The cycle began with an infant (or was it a fetus?) cradled in the bulb of a plant, and there were female nudes holding fruit and sheaves of wheat, then airplanes and birds, boats and fish mushrooming into immense portraits of how man uses the natural world to feed his technology: animals whose blood is turned into serum for vaccines, minerals being heated and poured to make poison gas and V-8 engines, a world of blast furnaces and paint ovens and smokestacks, a roaring inferno where men stamp, hone, deburr, hammer and curse cars into being.

They studied the frescoes for a long time without speaking. It was Doyle who broke the silence. “You never told me—how'd your paper about the Cubists turn out?”

“Pretty well, actually.”

“Did you mention Rivera?”

“Just briefly. The time he spent in Paris with Picasso and Juan Gris. Mainly I concentrated on Orozco and Siquieros. But I've got bigger news.”

“Oh?”

“My thesis proposal just got accepted. I'm going to write about the Monuments Men, you know, the Roberts Commission, the guys who cataloged and returned artwork the Nazis looted during the war.”

“There was a ton of stuff, wasn't there?”

“The Nazis looted so much art that they had to store it in caves and mines.”

“How'd you get into that?”

“My thesis advisor was on the Roberts Commission before he came to teach at Wayne State. While he was doing some provenance research he learned that a Monet in this museum's permanent collection had been looted by the Nazis. He saw to it that it got returned to its rightful owners, a Jewish family in France. It was the first time an American museum's ever done that.”

“Good for the D.I.A. That's very cool.”

“I think so too. I've decided to go into provenance research after I get my degree. My advisor believes it's going to be the wave of the future.”

They were quiet again, gazing at the frescoes, neither of them feeling pressure to make small talk. Again it was Doyle who broke the silence. “You know this whole thing's a lie, don't you?”

“What is?”

He waved at the frescoes. “Those beautiful earth tones. Those workers who look like dancers. All that noble toil. It's all bullshit!”

Several people turned in their direction.

“Down boy,” Cecelia said, stroking his hair.

He lowered his voice. “In a real car plant all the men are thick and muscular and everything's black and white and gray, even the people. Especially the people. It was like we were being covered with metal shavings, turned from black men and white men into gray men. The only color I remember was orange. Usually the sparks were white, but every once in a while they were orange for some reason. I remember thinking those orange sparks were the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Probably because everything else was so ugly.”

“You worked on the line?”

He told her about his brief career attaching leaf springs at Chevy Gear & Axle the summer after his junior year of high school. On his third day he saw a defective drop forge slice off a man's left hand cleanly at the wrist. The blood came out like water out of a garden hose. Fifteen minutes later, after a cursory inspection by some foremen, another man was running the forge. Doyle walked out of the place and never went back. Then he told Cecelia about how his father's forty-two-year career at the Rouge came to an abrupt end six weeks before his retirement—the meatloaf sandwich, the heart attack.

Doyle said, “Notice how everyone on these walls is looking down, everyone except the overseers and the foremen? That's the one thing Rivera got right. My father wound up just like that, could barely lift his head enough to look you in the eye. The older he got, the more he shrank. I think he would've disappeared completely if he'd lived much longer.”

“You come here a lot?”

“Every chance I get.”

“I don't understand. If you hate these frescoes so much, if they make you so angry, why do you keep coming back? You some kind of masochist?”