Say Nice Things About Detroit (18 page)

III

“
Y
OU'RE A YOUNG
KID
,” Les told him. “You're used to staying up late. But wait till you get up there in years. I'm thirty-two in three months, and I tell you, this job is wearing on me.”

Marlon nodded. One thing he'd noticed, anyone older was always telling him how good he had it, and yet he always seemed to be working for them. Here he was now, polishing glasses while Les gave his nightly sermon. Marlon didn't want to hear about being tired; he wanted to learn to mix drinks, work a bill. The other stuff—an easy smile, the gift of gab—he had if he needed it.

Marlon usually went home with a hundred bucks. Chump change, but at least he was an honest chump. It was all part of the plan. He knew they'd been looking for him, but where would they look? None of the brothers came into Farmington, at least none Marlon knew. Eventually they would lose interest. All Marlon had to do was keep his head down and wait for Elvis to die. He had no doubt it would happen. He hoped E-Call would make it. They went back, had history. It was E-Call who told him that he had to get lost, that Elvis wanted his head and kept asking E-Call about him. E-Call could have turned him in and gotten major props for it, but he didn't.

“You should leave, too,” he'd told E-Call. “It's only a matter of time. Probably not a lot of it.” E-Call had shrugged, exhaled an “I'm aw-ight,” and looked away. That is, he'd heard it. Probably he'd been thinking about it. As for Elvis, well, Marlon figured no one stayed at that level long, never more than three years, and Elvis was in over two. It was just like Dirk always said. A new guy took over, sure he was smarter than the last, and it was never true.

It was E-Call's warning that made him wonder about Dirk and the sister, if Elvis had something to do with it. Elvis had seen Marlon in that car. They might have tailed him. Still, it was hard to imagine Dirk getting taken so easily. He knew how to handle himself. He was older, but the kind of guy you didn't run into often: he never bragged, and yet he was so sure of himself that you knew he would come out on top. If Elvis had killed him, then Marlon didn't want to know. Dirk used to say, “It's all over but the crying.” Now Marlon understood what he meant.

Marlon wanted Dirk back. For a long time he had thought Dirk was crazy, or at least silly, the way he worked so hard and got so little for it. Of course, Marlon's father had been like that, too. The two of them had jobs they knew would never get them anywhere, at least nowhere with money. It seemed almost un-American, not wanting more, staying away from even a hint of showiness. These were men who didn't know the meaning of the word “bling,” who stayed with one woman. They did it all in the same rundown place and never complained about it.

I must be getting older,
Marlon thought, because Dirk's life, or even his father's life, didn't sound so bad, at least the solid-citizen part, the part with a job on the right side of the law, with a boss who might one day fire you but would never kill you. Bad shit was what everyone thought happened to someone else, despite all the damn bodies and beatings and general mayhem. Something in the game made you blind. No one inside could see that you won by walking away before you lost.

So he just had to wait on Elvis. He read the
Free Press
crime section every day and spent his nights as Les's barback, with his eyes often glued to the door. He didn't want to be surprised. Les had noticed, thought he was looking for women, which in truth was a small part of it.

• • •

L
.A.
WAS THE
plan, but he didn't want to leave town not knowing if Elvis was alive or at least in prison. In Los Angeles—“swimming pools and movie stars,” as E-Call was always saying—he would never know if he was really on the run. He'd spend years looking over his shoulder. In Detroit he could learn a trade, wait for the news to find him, and then head west without a worry and maybe by then about fifty grand on top of what he had in the bank. In the meantime he had David, who could teach him what he needed to know about the world of civilians.

For instance, he'd just filed a tax return. His first one. One Saturday morning David had taken him to the post office and taught him how to send a letter so he'd get proof that the government got it. There was all sorts of shit out there like that, stuff he knew nothing about. He was beginning to understand how important this knowledge was.

“Now you're a law-abiding citizen,” David had said outside the post office.

“Damn,” Marlon responded, the only thing he could think to say.

• • •

I
T WAS THE
middle of the shift on Thursday when Monique came into the bar. He saw her the moment she put a high heel into the room. It bothered him how black mothers were always giving their girls these French names when there was nothing French about them, unlike, say, Marlon's own mother, whose family had actually come from a place where they spoke French. Monique looked good, though, better even than the last time he'd seen her, back in high school. Seven years. He figured they were probably the best years a woman was going to get. She was perhaps taller now—or maybe it was just the heels—and she had this wave to her hair. He tried to remember why he'd broken it off.

She was with a tall guy in a sport coat and an open collar, an older man who immediately made Marlon jealous. Looked like some guy with an office job and a nice car, making money no one would kill him for. The truth was they really didn't even stand out if you overlooked the skin color, which, of course, no one would overlook. Usually Marlon was the only black person in the room, and he was sure everyone knew it.

He wanted to talk to her, but he decided to stay low and hope she wouldn't notice him. Hard to disappear if old girlfriends were finding you. No, he decided, she'd notice him, but maybe she wouldn't recognize him. He was two inches taller, and he wore his hair tight now. He was wearing a business uniform—black pants with a belt, white shirt buttoned all the way up, with a clip-on bow tie, like one of those Farrakhan freaks—and sometimes when he looked in the mirror he barely recognized the face staring back at him. There was a good crowd tonight.

A half hour later Laurie was yelling at him as he was stocking the bar's small fridge with more Buds from the back walk-in. He was kneeling but being careful not to let his knees hit the floor mats. He could smell them, that peculiar, funky odor of wet rubber.

“Hey, Marlon, there's a girl over on seventeen says she knows you.” Laurie was the cocktail waitress, long legs and short hair.

“What girl?” he said, so he could finish the stocking.

“What girl you think?”

He stood. Monique was looking right at him.

“Damn,” Les said, shaking up a cosmo, “you black people really do all know each other.”

“I think I gotta go over there,” Marlon said.

“I think you do,” answered Les.

Marlon ducked under the bar counter at the end and walked to Monique's table, Monique smiling at him the whole way. Back in high school she was always telling him he could be somebody, that he was smart enough to do what he wanted, and the funny thing was, he thought she believed this. It wasn't just something she said.

“Well, look at you, Marlon Booker,” she said now. She stood and hugged him, then introduced her date, whose name was Michael McKinley. He had a self-consciously firm handshake and a voice that he lowered to say, “How do you do?”

Marlon thought he knew why Monique was so happy: here she was, a customer at this out-of-the-city bar, and here Marlon was,
working
at that bar. Like she'd risen and he hadn't. He played along. “You living out in the burbs now?”

“We are,” she said. “Michael and I are engaged.”

“That's great,” Marlon said, though he didn't like it. All this time, but he still thought of her as his.

“I'm glad to see you here,” she said.

“Why's that?”

“I heard you were hustling, you know, downtown.”

“Yeah? Who say that?”

“Just something going around. Thought I'd never see you again.”

“You ever go back?” he asked. “To the east side?”

“Marlon, it's not like it's a different country.”

“Feels it,” Michael said. “Specially from this bar.”

Marlon wasn't going to start liking this Michael dude, but the man had a point. “Listen,” Marlon said to Monique, “you see anyone from the neighborhood, don't tell them you saw me.”

“Why?”

“ 'Cause I really don't want to be found.”

She nodded, as if she understood. Which she didn't. He was glad to get back behind the bar.

IV

“
Y
OU LOOK GREAT,”
he told her. She was standing in his doorway, a few weeks of pregnancy to go, with more weight in her face and an expression that seemed more serious. This felt earned, and David found it appealing. Many of the women he'd known seemed to believe that things would always work out for the best. David preferred a woman who faced the world head on.

“Don't bullshit me.” She walked into the house.

“I mean it,” he said. “Really great.”

She studied him, gave him a look as if she might leave open the possibility that he was telling the truth. He led her to the living room, where he had her mother's letters on the side table. She sat, and he followed. He explained where he'd found the letters and handed them over.

“My God, it must have killed her,” Carolyn said after she'd read them. “It might still be killing her.”

He admitted it might still be.

“We have to do better,” she said. She put a hand on his arm. “Promise me we'll do better.”

“You could move in here,” he said. “We could do better by being together.”

“And send Kevin to Detroit schools?”

He hadn't thought of that. “We'll send him to Liggett,” he said, wondering at the expense of a private school in Grosse Pointe.

“Where's that?”

“It's just out 8 Mile.”

She considered, and didn't say no. This gave him hope. She said, “So, are you going to feed me? What are you making?”

“I don't cook. I'll take you anywhere you'd like.”

She didn't want to go to a restaurant, she said, because then she would want a drink. “You want to make me happy?” she said. “Get me a Wendy's double bacon cheeseburger, fries, and a Frosty. You got a Wendy's around here?”

There was one up on 8 Mile and Livernois. He went to the drive-through and ended up waiting behind a Chevrolet pounding out rap. It was one of those times—there'd been a couple in the last several weeks—when he'd felt like a foreigner in his own city. Still, in the Audi (he still hadn't gotten the new car) he could feel the industrial pounding of the music, and it seemed a proper rhythm. He felt an ache for his city. Since moving back he'd found himself rooting for Detroit, reverently waiting for it to rise in some miraculous resurrection.

• • •

A
T HOME HE
watched as she devoured the burger as though she were a refugee from a famine-stricken land. He slid his burger her way.

“Aren't you hungry?” she asked.

“I don't know that I'm as hungry as you're hungry.”

She tore off a corner of his burger and slid the rest back. “Yours always tastes better,” she said.

Later she took him to his bedroom and made him turn off the lights. When Julie had been pregnant with Cory she hadn't let David anywhere near her, and till now Carolyn hadn't been that different. They hadn't slept together in more than a month. Tonight she lay on her side, back to him, and told him to put his arms around her. He could tell she was thinking; there was a certain tension in her body.

“You should move in with me,” he said. “You and Kevin. All of us, the new baby, too, right here.”

She didn't answer.

“Sometimes, Carolyn, you've just got to leap. You can't make a big move with baby steps.”

“And you think I should make the big move.”

“I do.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm asking,” he said.

V

M
ARLON DROVE HOME
knowing the clock had been moved up. Like Monique wouldn't mention him the first time she ran into someone who knew him, or she'd put it on some stupid Facebook page. You could think the city was big and wide, but there were worlds within worlds, and they all touched. Word would get back to Elvis within a week.

He came in the house through the side door, walked past the pantry into the kitchen, and found David sitting with a cup of tea, the expensive kind where each bag came wrapped like a rubber in its own foil cover.

“You're up late,” Marlon said.

“Or early.”

He was wearing that blue robe he wore at night, which meant he was up late, or at least he hadn't bothered to get dressed yet.

“You okay?” Marlon asked.

“Couldn't sleep. You want some tea?”

“Tea's for, like, English people. I look English to you?”

David chuckled, got up, and went to boil more water. “You'll look English with a cup of tea,” David said.

“You ever been to L.A.?” Marlon asked.

“Twice.”

“You like it?”

“What's not to like? Sun and palm trees. Crowded, though.”

“Been thinking I should move.”

David finished playing with the tea bag and turned around. “L.A., huh?”

“I like the sun and I ain't never seen a palm tree.”

David smiled. He was always doing that, which was odd, because Marlon didn't think David was all that happy. He put a cup of tea in front of Marlon. “You might want some sugar. It's mint. Good for slowing you down.”