Say Nice Things About Detroit (20 page)

“Check the house for what?” David asked.

“Anything missing.”

David invited him in, but Wilson said he'd stay on the lawn. Inside everything seemed normal. David had some cash he kept in his sock drawer along with his passport, but both were still there. Only Marlon's room looked different. Clothes still hung in the closet and there were a few things in the drawers, but it looked emptier than the last time David had been here. There was no extra pair of sneakers on the floor, no baseball caps on the one chair, no dirty clothes on the floor. Still, David couldn't believe Marlon would just leave like that, without even a goodbye. There had to be some reasonable explanation.

As David walked from the closet, he tripped over something and had to put his hand down on the bed. He found a small tire iron on the floor. Odd, he thought.

Outside, in the sunshine, he told Wilson everything was in order, though it also seemed possible that Marlon was gone.

“You aren't happy about that?” Wilson asked.

“No. I like the kid.”

Wilson shook his head.

“I can't believe he didn't say goodbye,” David said.

“You go back inside, you look for the thing that has the most value to you, and you make sure it's there. Then you have the locks changed and count your blessings.”

David went back in. He knew nothing was missing, but to be sure, he checked the bookshelf for the letters he'd written to Cory. They were still there. He sat down to write another.

X

C
AROLYN HAD BIG
plans for the evening, but by the time she got to David's she didn't feel like going out. Pregnancy had a way of doing that.

“But I made reservations at the Wendy's on Livernois,” David said. When she smiled at him, he said, “Would you believe Joe Muer's?” Even she knew it had been torn down. In fact, he'd made reservations at an Italian place. He called to cancel and then went to put a frozen pizza in the oven. Even before it was baked she was so tired she could barely speak. She asked him to do the talking. “Tell me something about you I don't know,” she said, and that's when she got the full story of his lost son, of the fight and the yelling and the slap and the permanent inability to make it right. She learned that he wrote the dead boy letters, even though there was no place to send them. She found it sad and beautiful and somehow comforting.

• • •

S
OON THEY WERE
heading upstairs. She had asked for this. “Will you sleep with me but not sleep with me?” was how she'd put it. She was too tired for sex, too big, too . . . unsexy. But if he would lie beside her and hold her and sleep with her through the night, then she would be happy.

As she walked into the bedroom, she saw a piece of metal on the bed.

“It's a tire iron,” David explained. “Marlon left it behind.”

“Why's it here?”

“I figure I can use it for protection,” he said.

“Why not get a gun?”

“God, if I had a gun, I'd probably get depressed and shoot myself.”

“See, David,” she said, “that's the difference between you and me. If I had a gun, I'd probably get depressed and shoot someone else.”

• • •

S
HE SLEPT WELL,
but then woke to pee. Afterward, she couldn't get back to sleep. It was about half past midnight. She decided to go downstairs and make some tea. That was one thing she knew about David: he had tea. She thought again about him writing letters to his dead son. It was a bizarre thing to do, but she didn't mind that he was doing it. He'd lost a son, and you had to allow him a little craziness.

XI

H
E HEARD PEOPLE
downstairs. He opened his eyes and saw darkness, didn't know where he was, and then recognized the ceiling, his room, the new one. He reached over for Carolyn, but the bed was empty.

He rose, put on his robe. It was a little after one according to the green light of his alarm clock. He thought he heard walking, boots on the hardwood floors. Marlon, perhaps, come back with friends. Or maybe just Carolyn. He walked to the stairs and called down to her.

“Don't come down!” came the reply, her voice so distraught, so panicked, that it created the same feelings in him: he felt his bowels slacken and sweat form on the back of his neck.

“Get down here,” said a voice. Low, male, black.

David stopped, turned, went back to the bedroom for the tire iron. It was cold in his hand, and it occurred to him that he'd fetched it without thought, as if the instinct to have a weapon were simply inside him. Now he wished he'd gotten a gun, not that he'd ever fired one. He'd grown up in the suburbs. As for tire irons, he'd used one once, when Carter was president, to change a tire.

There were footsteps, boots on the stairs, heavy weight ascending. Every molecule in David's body wanted to flee, to hide, but Carolyn was down there. He thought he could hear her sobbing. He moved down the hallway toward the stairs, the footsteps nearing, the pace methodical, a metronome. The first thing he saw was the gun, and then, briefly, a man, shaved head, leather jacket, but by the time this registered David was already swinging. The tire iron hit the man in the forehead with a damp clang. The bar vibrated in David's hands. There was a brief moment—probably less than a second, though it seemed far longer­—when time stopped; David saw surprise, pain, then blankness pass across the man's face, and then the world spun again and the man fell backward, banging and crashing down the stairs. The gun, though, fell onto the second-floor landing, bounced twice on the wood, and came to rest on the runner that ran the length of the hallway.

David peeked down the stairs. The man—even from here he looked huge—lay sprawled at the bottom of the stairs. It was so quiet that for a second David thought he'd gone deaf, but then the voice came back.

“Get down here, or she's dead.”

“Don't come down,” Carolyn yelled.

They hit her. David heard it, and then he heard her cry.

“I'm going to give you one minute to be down here, or she's dead.”

He was sure they meant it.

“I'm coming,” he called.

David took the gun. It was surprisingly heavy. Somewhere, he thought, there was a safety. He didn't know where, but he knew that much. Probably it was off. The man at the bottom of the stairs would have come up armed.

He would trade his life for hers. Just as he would have traded his life for Cory's. Here it was: the great second chance of his life. There was one goal now, to get her out. He took a breath and started down. He could see the body below him. He looked at the grain of the stained wood on the stairs and was struck by its beauty, surprised that he'd never noticed it before. He took in the smell of the house, a faint, dry odor, perhaps from the old books. He looked again at the man at the bottom of the stairs. He descended with confidence. Now that he had decided to give up his own life, he felt invincible.

Two steps from the bottom of the stairs he saw them. Carolyn was in his reading chair. A man stood in front of her pointing a gun at her head. She was quietly sobbing. The man holding the gun was tall and lean, expressionless, also in a leather jacket. Beside him was the kid who had come with Marlon to David's office the day they met.

David stepped over the man at the bottom of the stairs.

“Drop the gun or I'll blow her brains out.”

David considered. “And then I'll kill you,” he said. His voice sounded very loud in his head. Slowly he raised the gun, sighted it as best he could. He held it with two hands, the way he'd seen police do it on TV. The man was maybe twenty feet away, close enough, he thought, for him to feel uncertain about his chances.

The man nodded to the kid, Marlon's friend. The kid produced a gun from his waistband and pointed it at David.

“Two beats one,” said the man.

“What do you want?” David asked.

No one said anything. He looked at Carolyn. Her head was down, her hair hanging snarled over her face. She sniffled. Gasped.

“Marlon. You give me Marlon and you live.”

“Why should I trust you?” David said.

“Don't,” Carolyn cried.

With his free hand, the man slapped her. She cried out. David moved forward.

“You got no choice,” said the man. David stood perfectly still, trying to think his way through this. The man stepped away from Carolyn and said, “E, shoot the bitch.”

David squeezed the trigger. He was pointing the gun at the man, but nothing happened. He pulled harder and still nothing happened. A long, agonizing second passed. He charged, ran right at the man, who was still pointing the gun at him. Later, the utter foolishness of this act was apparent, but at the moment he was merely running, throwing himself into the fray, trying to stop what couldn't be stopped.

The explosion so startled him that he fell to his knees. For a moment he thought he'd been shot, but he felt nothing. Carolyn screamed. That was when he knew she was okay. David lay facedown on the floor. He looked up and there in front of him was the man, eyes blank, head bleeding. It was eerie, chilling. David had never before looked into a dead man's eyes. He crawled around the man to Carolyn.

She was on the floor, sobbing. He held her and then looked up at the kid, who almost smiled. Then he set his gun on the floor; a tendril of smoke rose from its barrel. He stood and put his palms up.

“That's all,” he said. “It's over.”

XII

H
E WALKED OVER
to check on Dre; the man was dead. He had a big bump on the front of his head, and whether the blow had killed him or the cartwheels down the stairs, E-Call couldn't say. He was just glad, 'cause you didn't shoot Elvis and not expect Dre to do something about it.

He looked back at the man and the pregnant lady. The whole thing was fucked up. He knew Elvis was after Marlon, but till tonight, when they found what must have been the hiding place in the floor joists, he hadn't really believed that Marlon was skimming. He just thought that Elvis had the wrong impression. Of course, when a man had an impression and a gun, the truth wasn't all that important. Marlon had split, and that was smart, but it was sad, too, because E-Call wasn't sure he'd ever see him again. Marlon was really the only family he had. More family than his own real brother.

The lawyer was moving the woman away from Elvis. E-Call felt relief at his death, and so he knew he'd made the right decision. And he'd made that decision early, as soon as they got in the house, because Elvis never brought E-Call along for things like this. He was a street seller, all retail, not muscle, so Elvis must have had an impression. He must have wanted to keep an eye on him. There was probably someone back at E-Call's place right now, looking for the lost cash. Marlon had told him to get out, and that was right. Now, especially, he'd have to disappear, which was easy enough. He'd planned for it.

They all went to the kitchen. “Why? Why'd you do that?” the lawyer asked. He handed E-Call a Vernor's, which was good. E-Call liked Vernor's, and his mouth was very dry.

“Why you do it? You thought you was gonna run through a bullet.”

“I had to do something.”

“Like die?”

“I wasn't thinking about myself.”

“Well, I was,” E-Call said. “And I was next. When you took care of Dre, you made it easy. And besides, it wasn't right, hitting a pregnant lady. There are supposed to be rules.”

“Thank you,” the woman said.

“You welcome.” He took a swig of Vernor's. Nothing ever had tasted so good. “Mostly I did it for Marlon.”

“Do you know what happened to him?”

“He gone. That was the smart play, and Marlon was always smart.”

“Did he really take money from those men?” the lawyer asked.

“I bet he did. He was a man with a plan. I just did my part, you know. For Marlon.”

“For Marlon?”

“We family. Can't be nothing that trumps that.”

“Family?” the lawyer asked.

“Came up together,” E-Call told him, feeling nostalgic, wishing Marlon were here. “Thicker than blood.”

XIII

R
USSELL WILSON CAME
in with the police. He knew the lead detective. They left Carolyn in the kitchen with the paramedics and they sat David down in the dining room and asked him questions. He kept two secrets. First, that the “robbers” had been after Marlon. Second, who the kid was who turned on his boss. The detective told David he was one lucky SOB, and David didn't argue.

The detective, who was black, folded up his notebook and took another moment to think on the matter. “Just one more question,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Here. In Palmer Woods. I mean, you just moved in, right?”

And that's when Wilson piped up from the side of the room. David hadn't even known he was still there.

“He belongs here,” Wilson said.

The detective looked at the judge, then back at David, and left without speaking.

• • •

T
WO NIGHTS LATER
he took Kevin to a Tigers game.

It was Carolyn's idea. She thought they needed to spend time together, and David could see her point. David hadn't formed an opinion of the kid one way or the other. He was quiet, that was all. David had gone back to Bergen and asked for two good seats. They again ended up just behind the Tigers' dugout.

For two innings David got nothing but one-word answers. Then, in the third, Kevin turned to him. “You know,” he said, “you're not my dad.”

“I know that. And I don't want to be.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I happen to be in love with your mother. I'd like us all to make a home together. But no one will ever be your father except your father.”