Say Nice Things About Detroit (15 page)

“Just want you to know, Mom, that from this day on, I'm going straight.” He was at the sink now, helping her dry dishes, his stomach so full he was thinking he wouldn't eat tomorrow, the first day of his new life.

“That's good,” she said.

“And I'm gonna get my GED.”

“Your father always wanted you to go to college.”

“I don't know about that. But the GED, I'll get that, just like Dad.”

“The GED is a start,” his mother said. “But fathers, they always want their sons to go further.”

“Something the matter?” he asked, knowing there was; he could hear it in the way she talked, softly, as if she could barely get the words out.

She handed him a plate. “I worry,” she said.

“I'm gonna be clean, get me a job, with hours and all. Solid-citizen stuff.”

“What happened?” she wanted to know.

“I'm older, is all. Been remembering Dad, and Dirk, thinking maybe they were on to something. Sometimes, for me, it's like they're still here. Like ghosts or something. I had that feeling today, like I was going to walk in here and Dad would be washing up for dinner, scrubbing that steel plant off of him.”

“I get that feeling sometimes, too,” his mother said. She thought a moment and then wanted to know what kind of work he was going to look for.

“Bartending. I'm good at it.”

“You'll be out late, when all the trouble happens.”

“You worry too much,” he told her. “Bartending you make good money, cash tips, and they got smoking outlawed pretty much everywhere now, so the air's good. Lot better than some steel plant. I can go to school in the day. I'll get further than Dad. You'll see, Mom.”

With that his phone started ringing. She looked at him as if she were accusing him; he looked down at the number: 303. Where the hell was that? Wasn't 313, Detroit, or 312, Chicago. He answered it.

“Marlon, it's David Halpert.”

“Yo,” Marlon said. “Give me a sec.” To his mother he said, “It's my lawyer.”

“Why you need a lawyer? And what kind of lawyer calls on Christmas?”

“He's the lawyer, how should I know?” Marlon set the towel on the counter and made for the living room.

“I'm here,” he said.

“Been thinking about your proposal,” David said.

“You been thinking good,” Marlon said.

“How's that?”

“You don't call a brother on Christmas to give him bad news.”

“You got me there, Marlon. But I've got conditions.”

“Ground rules?” Marlon said.

“You could call them that,” said David.

“Then tell me what you need.”

XX

D
AVID HUNG UP
the phone and paced around his living room. It was an impetuous decision, though maybe, he thought, a mitzvah, a deed done because it needed to be done and he could do it. It would be good to have someone in the house. Marlon was a black kid twenty years younger, and maybe he could be good company. Certainly he needed guidance.

Mostly David missed Cory. All the strain of fathering seemed like nothing compared to not being able to do it at all. It was a loss at the center of him, searing and eternal. David knew he was looking for a second chance and that he'd never really get one, not the exact one he was looking for. Still, other chances would come around, and he intended to make use of them.

He found himself strolling along his bookcases, looking at the cloth spines of the books. “They're all Dirk's,” Shelly had explained. “He collected books, could never throw one away.”

“And the covers?” David asked.

“I took them off. Didn't like the way they shined in the light, all garish and cheap.”

Now, at the end of a shelf, David noticed an envelope, and he pulled it out. Actually there were three, all addressed to Dirk, “c/o The Bookers,” in “Detroit, Mich.” There was no zip code. David checked the postmarks: 1958 and 1959.

David pulled a letter from one of the envelopes. It started, “My dearest little boy,” and it was signed, “Love, Mommy.” The script was odd, difficult to read. A letter from Tina to Dirk.

David read all three. In the letters Tina professed her love and lamented that they lived apart. It baffled David: they were separated by just a few miles, and yet they had their own personal 8 Mile running right through the family.

David fetched a legal pad from his briefcase, sat in one of the living room's reading chairs, and wrote his own letter. “Dear Cory,” it started.

I miss you as I would miss life itself. If I could be with you, then I would be with you. They say if you save one life you save the whole world. If I could have saved you it would have saved our world, yours and mine. But I couldn't. I am sorry about that, and mostly I am sorry about how I left things with you. I can't change that. But there is this one other life I can change, so I will. I am letting someone live in my house. He is a young man who needs a little help, and I am going to give it to him. Just as I would have given it to you.

Love, Dad

He folded up the note and slid it between two of the envelopes that contained Tina's letters. Then he put them all back where he found them, now his own personal Wailing Wall. He stepped back. It felt, oddly, as if the world had changed. And then the phone rang.

XXI

I
T WAS STILL
Christmas, and she was driving to the city to see David at Dirk's house. All the Christmases of her life she had never once visited it.

She'd called him and said that she had to see him right away, and of course he had agreed. It was time. She couldn't keep putting it off. Having the baby was her decision, and if he wanted nothing to do with the child, she would accept that. She would have to accept it, but she didn't want it to go that way. She also didn't want an offer of marriage—it was too soon, and she was still technically married, in any case. She just wanted him to accept the situation, to let her stay in his life, and he in hers, and to agree that somehow they would raise the child. She was asking for just one simple thing: the possibility of a future.

“Did someone die?” he asked when he opened the door. She entered the house. He looked exhausted. It was a little after ten. She had promised nine and was late, as usual.

“Honestly,” he said, “I've been trying to come up with what you felt was so important that you had to come down here in the middle of the night on Christmas to tell me.”

“Can we sit down?” she asked.

“Is it about Dirk?”

“What about him?”

“Have they found anything out? Anything about what happened?”

“They've got shell casings and slugs, but no guns that match. They've gone through several dozen of his old cases to see if this was payback of some kind. People on parole, that sort of thing. They've found nothing.”

“So they still have no idea?”

“No.” Her feet were hurting. “Can we sit down?”

They went to the living room, where months before she had sat with her mother and Shelly and looked at the pictures of her dead brother. Now she sat and took a deep breath. She had practiced a preamble, but she dispensed with it. “David,” she said, “I'm pregnant. With your baby.”

He just stared at her, as if he couldn't believe what he'd heard. She wished he would say something. Anything. She had an odd feeling, as if she were about to be hit by lightning.

“I'm not asking for anything from you,” she told him, and then she went into the speech she'd practiced in the car, how this had been her choice, she didn't want to pressure him into anything. She also felt he had the right to know, it was—

He held up his hand.

“Are you telling me you don't want me involved?”

“No,” she said. “I'd like you involved. I'd really like it.”

“Good.”

There was a long silence. Why, she wondered, wasn't he saying anything? For a moment she wondered if he'd heard her, or if she'd said anything at all.

“That's all you're going to say?” she asked. “I mean, David, you and me, I've been thinking we've got a chance, you know, but then there's this baby, and that puts all this pressure on it. All this responsibility. I want to do it right, and I hope that I can do it right with you. But it's—”

“I had a son once,” he said, cutting her off by changing the angle of his shoulders. “And I didn't think I'd ever have another. Of course I'll raise this child with you. How could you think otherwise?”

“It's soon for us. Maybe too much, too soon.”

“I don't believe in that,” he said.

“In what?”

“In too much, or too soon. There's either good or there's not good. There's either right or there's not right.”

He smiled at her, stood, and walked to her. He held out his hand. She took it and he pulled her to her feet. He put his arms around her. He had a distinct smell, musky now, a man who lived hard, who tried hard. She felt his arms around her ribs. She leaned against him and he let her, holding her. This, she realized, was what she wanted, once in a while to put her weight in a man's arms. In all her years with Marty, never once had he done anything like this. She felt herself crying.

“It's right,” he whispered.

“How can you know that?”

“You and me, Carolyn,” he said, “we've got nothing to lose.”

 

Summer
2006

I

W
hen his phone started to shake, Dirk knew it was Marlon. Dirk had always had that sense; the two of them were connected in that way.

“Yo, Uncle Dirk, yo,” the kid said.

“Two yo's too many,” Dirk said.

“Just playing with you.”

It was a sunny day, warm and humid, like most of July. He was out in his driveway, working on the car, moisturizing the leather in the front seat. Marlon didn't call to check in or to see how the Burtons were making out, and certainly not to invite them out for a meal or a get-together. Marlon called for one reason: he needed something.

“You need a place to go?” Dirk asked.

“You mean, like sleeping?” Marlon said. “Yeah, I was thinking I might use a few nights.”

“Why don't you move in?” Dirk said. “Stay with us.”

“That would be with your ground rules,” Marlon said.

“You know the deal, if you're ready for it.” Dirk had made this offer many times before. He made it as an offering to Everett, and he made it because, despite Marlon's poor behavior, he liked the boy and wanted to help him.

“Maybe,” Marlon said.

Dirk dropped his rag, stood up in the sunshine. Marlon had never said “maybe” before. “Talk to me, son.”

“Thought we could negotiate,” the boy said.

“Negotiate? Negotiate what?”

“Ground rules. Like you call 'em.”

“There's a reason they're called ground rules and not ground suggestions.”

“Want to make sure we're communicating,” Marlon said. This was one of Dirk's lines, coming back at him. Marlon did that often.

“They are my rules,” Dirk said. He wanted to take Marlon in, but not if his house would be used as a base for a career in the drug trade. He'd spent his whole life fighting it, and there was some irony he just couldn't take. Not that he'd ever thought he'd win the long fight with the dealers, but he had won the short ones. His own survival was proof of his victory. Sooner or later all the drug dealers went away. That was certain. It was why he wanted to help Marlon get out before it was too late.

“I was just thinking at dinner we might get it all worked out,” Marlon said. Dirk had also taught him this. It was why interrogations could take forever. No one just came out and said what he had to say. Often he had to say everything else first.

“Okay, dinner will work,” Dirk said. “You need a ride?”

“I'm good on the ride. I was thinking Greektown.” Marlon loved Greek food. And Lord knew the kid needed to eat.

“Greektown, then.”

“Bring your sister,” Marlon said.

“My sister?”

“The white girl.”

“What for?”

Marlon had met Natalie on a chance encounter, down on the esplanade by Hart Plaza. Marlon had been up to no good, Dirk was sure. This was back in May, an evening with the same milky sky and warm air as now. “Meet my sister,” Dirk had said at the time.

“Your sister?”

“Same momma.”

“Damn,” Marlon said.

“You're Everett's son,” said Natalie. After that, Marlon changed, dropped the swagger and acted almost human, merely from hearing his father's name. Dirk had never felt that hearing his own father's name, but often fathers were like that, Dirk had noticed, both a burden and a blessing.

“Be good to have a third party there,” Marlon said. He wanted Natalie to be the referee.

“You can trust me to do what I say I'll do. You know that.”

“I'm just saying, you and me, we don't always see the world the same way,” Marlon said. “She can be like the Judge Judy.”

Dirk heard something off in Marlon's voice. “You in trouble?” he asked.

“I'm good.”

“Seven, then.” The line went dead. There was no mention of the restaurant, but they always went to the same place, the New Parthenon, right there in downtown Detroit.

Dirk slid the phone into his pants, looked up, and saw Shelly watching him from the front door. He knew himself to be a lucky man, and most of this was because of her. All these years and he was still in love with her. Even the passion he had felt for her at the beginning could still well up in him. They agreed on almost everything. There was really only one issue between them.

“Marlon,” he explained.

“You don't have to be that boy's savior.”

“Gotta try.”

“Dirk, he's up to no good. You say it yourself.”

“He wants to set himself right. I made a promise. I've got to help.”

She walked down the front steps and over to his car, so she could speak softly. Beads of sweat dotted her forehead. “I don't think so.”

“He's going to move in for a while.” He wanted to tell her about the dinner tonight but decided not to. For Shelly he had to keep Marlon down to small doses. He said he was meeting Natalie, but Shelly wasn't through on the subject of Marlon.

“When you made that promise to Everett, he didn't mean this. Everett never would have asked this much.”

“Everett asked only for what he needed. Look, baby, it's not much. A meal here and there, a phone call.”

“A place to stay.”

“He's a good guest. Quiet.”

“Comes and goes at all hours. Never says goodbye.”

“He's growing up,” Dirk told her. “He'll get better. So please, let me keep my word.”

• • •

H
E PICKED UP
Natalie at 6:15, and together they headed back south down the long corridors of Detroit freeway.

“How's it feel, playing judge?” he asked.

“I like it.”

“Of course you'll be on my side.”

“I'll be fair,” she said.

“That's Marlon's idea about you.”

“He's a good judge of character, then,” she said.

Perhaps he was. Or perhaps he was learning. Marlon was twenty-five now. Street smart, no doubt. Dirk had worked these streets for more than twenty years, knew much of what the kid knew, which was a lot of crumbling, crime-soaked cement, vacant buildings, broken glass, depthless desperation and desire. The weak and the strong. Lucky and unlucky. A sane man of a certain age—maybe it was twenty-five—would get out.

“So you understand,” he told Natalie. “Marlon is trying to get out of the life, and this needs to happen. It's a fine line, laying down the rules and not scaring him back to the streets.”

“Why does he want to live with you?”

“Lost his father young. I think he might be getting old enough to realize he could use some guidance. Also, something out there is scaring him.”

“What is it?”

“I don't know.”

“Then how do you know it's scaring him?”

“I've got an ear for it,” he told her. “And I've been listening for a long, long time.”

II

E
ARLY THAT MORNING
Marlon parked his car by Greektown, but the day had taken him far afield and so now he had E-Call drop him at the Ren Cen. He didn't want E-Call to know he was meeting Dirk, whom E-Call called “Mr. FBI.” Marlon said he had a dentist appointment, was going to see about some gold caps. Marlon knew it would never occur to E-Call that you don't go to the dentist after six at night, or that the Ren Cen wasn't the kind of place people got their teeth fixed.

“What's it like in there?” E-Call asked Marlon. Marlon just wanted to get out of the Mazda, which E-Call was proud of though it was really just a crappy car they'd taken off a junkie. It was shined to a black gleam, but it was still a Mazda.

“Ain't nothing,” Marlon said.

“Damn,” E-Call said. “I wouldn't go up there, all that glass.”

Marlon shrugged. E-Call was scared of heights, didn't even like driving across the Ambassador Bridge.

Marlon decided to take the People Mover, just like old times. Lately he'd been feeling nostalgic, thinking almost every day about his father. In a way, Marlon was similar to E-Call, T-Bone, Ray-Ray—he didn't have a father. Unlike them, he knew where his father was. And he had Dirk. None of them had a Dirk. No one else, anywhere, had a Dirk.

At seven, summer nights were still bright, hazy with the humidity, Canada almost fuzzy across the water. Up here on the People Mover, a man could feel powerful. Marlon wondered what Dirk would think if he knew $43,000 was stashed between the floor joists in his guest bedroom. It had taken almost two years to skim the money, a twenty here, a Grant there. He'd converted all the bills to hundreds and hidden them in the floor. It was amazing when you saw it there, all in one place: forty-three grand hardly took up any space at all.

They knew, though. Maybe not who had the money or how it was disappearing, but someone above E-Call knew something. E-Call said so. Elvis wasn't happy. Of course, Elvis was never happy, except about his name, which he'd chosen himself. He thought it funny, a black man named Elvis. “No one in this crew better be skimming,” E-Call said. “They find out it's one a us—hell, they even
think
it's one a us—we all dead.”

It was getting to be a risk to stick around, and Marlon figured it was a good time to step out. They wouldn't find him. Palmer Woods was way out of the territory, and Marlon would go north into the white areas for work. He'd lie low till he didn't have to look over his shoulder. Once he was sure no one was looking for him, he'd head west. Start over, just like Dirk was always telling him to do.

And no doubt it was what his father would want. He wished he could talk to the man now. He wanted to know what he'd say. In the past, the answer was obvious: get an education and a job at a desk. “It's the way of the world, son,” his father once said. “Sweat your ass off in some plant, you make a little. Sit at a nice desk, eat your lunch with silverware, you make a lot. You just need the diploma. It's the key to the kingdom.” But now there were hardly any desk jobs left; it was a different world in Detroit. Out west, though, there was supposed to be opportunity. And schooling was cheap. So maybe the answer was the same, just not in Detroit.

Getting on the People Mover at the Ren Cen meant he got to do almost the full loop before he got to Greektown, not a bad deal for fifty cents, a loop that ran by Joe Louis and Cobo, up almost to the new stadiums, and then down to Greektown. Marlon was the only person he knew who'd ever been on the People Mover. It was something tourists did, like people from Warren or Southfield, white or black. They were around him now, and he noticed they kept their distance, gave him all the space he needed.
I ain't packin
', he wanted to say, but even then he doubted they'd take the chance.

The restaurant had statues and fountains and waiters who lit cheese on fire and yelled “Opa!” Greece, he thought, must be one fucked-up place, but they ate well, better than cheeseburgers, and Marlon liked cheeseburgers. Marlon looked around: white folk mostly, and no Dirk or his sister. This was good, that he was first. It was advice he'd once heard Dre tell E-Call: you got a meet, you get there first. That way you could see what was coming at you.

Next thing Marlon knew, Dirk was hugging him, that whole big body and that cologne Dirk wore covering him like a blanket. One thing about Dirk: he was a big dude, six-three, an old man now, like fifty or something, but still tough-looking. Mr. FBI, the undercover brother. The white sister, Natalie, just stuck out her hand. “Nice to see you again, Marlon,” she said.

She was older but still a good-looking woman, and people kept looking over at the table, at this blond girl with the two black guys. It didn't bother Marlon much; he was used to getting stared at in the nice parts of town. He waited it out while the conversation went through stories of Dirk growing up with Marlon's father and the crazy things they did when they were young, which weren't really all that crazy, since what scared them most was getting caught by Marlon's grandfather and that just wasn't scary. At one point Marlon went to the john so he could check his text messages—the phone had been vibrating in his pocket—and he found three from E-Call. Jackson had been shot at, maybe some turf war crap, but maybe just the kind of random thing that happened now and again. Nonetheless, Elvis had everyone on high alert. Marlon called E-Call. He didn't want E-Call coming to look for him.

“What's that mean?” Marlon asked. “High alert.”

“Means watch your back.”

“I ain't working tonight, remember?”

“You think these motherfuckers care you're working?”

“How's Jackson?”

“He fine,” E-Call said. “How them caps?”

“Don't have 'em yet. Gotta go.” Marlon hung up. Marlon had known E-Call as long as he could remember, back when they were in maybe the second grade, drawing cars they'd make when they got older. Soon Marlon would move out of his life. Not seeing his friend would make the world a different place, which was sad but had to be.

Back at the table they got down to it. What Dirk wanted was simple. Marlon had to have a full-time job, pay three hundred bucks rent (“So you know it's worth something to live there,” Dirk said), and not stay out past midnight.

“What am I, fourteen?” Marlon said. “Midnight?”

“It's when all the trouble starts,” said Dirk.

“What if I'm working?”

“That's different.”

Marlon fumed. Then he thought,
Well, if I say I'm working, then I'm good.
“Fine,” he allowed.

“You're doing the right thing,” Natalie said.

“Funny how everyone is always thinking they know what that is.”

“I got a good idea,” she said.

• • •

A
FTER DINNER THEY
walked to Dirk's car, which he'd parked on the street. It was a sweet Mercedes, damn near new, just like he always had, this one with a white Olde English
D
on its back window.