Say Nice Things About Detroit (8 page)

She smiled at him and turned out the light.

• • •

S
HE SPENT THE
week trying to make it work with Marty, hiring a sitter so they could go to a movie, dinner. Once she made him eggs for breakfast, a special treat after he'd been instructed to watch his cholesterol. She knew he noticed the change, but he said nothing. Just as he had waited out her bad behavior, he tried to silently enjoy the good. He wasn't a man to bring things to a head.

And then she starting feeling sick in the mornings. She knew what it was. This was the third time she'd been pregnant. She'd miscarried once and had Kevin, both with Marty.

In the past she and Marty had had fertility testing, and it turned out that Marty wasn't all that fertile and that his chemistry didn't mix particularly well with hers. No surprise there, she thought in the doctor's office. The two previous pregnancies had been accomplished artificially. Eventually she and Marty stopped using birth control and she never got pregnant. She had been careful with David, but—well, it had to be him.

She called her therapist, Mandy, made an appointment, and picked up the phone to call David. Then she thought better of it. She didn't know what she wanted yet, and she still had a little time.

The mornings were hell, but later in the day she felt better. The truth was that she wanted another child. She hadn't realized this, but she knew it now, now that it was not only possible but happening.

It was Friday, the traffic brutal as she inched her way home, though she'd now have two days off and time to think. Then, next week, she'd make a decision. It was a relief, really, just to be determined to decide, even if she wasn't sure what the decision should be. Afterward she could get on with life without having to think about herself all the time. She was sick of that.

She walked in the house and found Marty sitting in the front hallway chair, a chair where no one ever sat, where coats were thrown when they entertained and it was cool enough in L.A. to wear a coat. She saw he had her cell phone in his hand. She had mistakenly left it at home that morning.

“Who's David?” he asked.

“David who?”

“David. He called you. He said he was a friend from Michigan.”

Christ,
she thought.

“Who is he?” Marty demanded.

“We need to talk,” she said.

1994

I

H
is mother said his father was waiting for him.

“What I do?” Marlon asked. He'd just walked in the house. He was supposed to be home by six. His digital watch said 5:51.

“He just wants to see you.”

The old man—that's how he looked—was propped up on the couch, leaning on the pillows and covered in blankets. He lifted a shaky arm to point the remote and mute the TV. Skin hung from his upper arm where there had once been muscle.

“Hey,” Marlon said.

“How was school?”

“Good.”

“Not so good, huh?” his father said. “You don't much like school.”

Marlon wondered,
What kind of trap is this?

“It was never much my favorite,” said his father. “But I wish I'd tried harder and gone to college. Coulda stayed out of East Side Steel that way.”

Marlon couldn't get over that his father had lost all of his hair, and all that weight. His eyes were sunken in his head, not that Marlon could really look. He caught short glimpses, from the side; it was all he could take.

“The chemo sucks,” his father said.

“It's like that's what's making you sick.”

“Feels like it. Maybe you could do me a favor.”

“What?” Marlon asked.

“Two things. First, I think I could eat something maybe. Could you make me some toast, with just a little butter?”

“Toast?” Marlon asked. He liked toast, made it for himself.

“Yeah, toast.”

“Okay. I can do toast.”

“And there's the other thing,” Everett said.

Marlon waited.

“Once in a while, call me Dad.”

Okay, Marlon thought. Call him Dad. He'd have to concentrate on that. For some reason, “Dad” didn't come out naturally.

He went out to the kitchen and got the bread. He picked rye, his father's favorite. “He wants toast,” he explained to his mother. She nodded, as if she had known it all along. He dropped the toast into the toaster and waited for the bread to turn brown. Then he spread a little butter on it and took it out to the living room, smelling that distinct scent of rye. His father straightened up, took a bite, then another. He chewed slowly. Marlon could hear the crunching; it made the skin on his arms crawl.

It didn't take long, less time than it took to make the toast. “Pass me the bucket,” his father said. Those two bites came right back up. His father wiped his mouth with the handkerchief he kept for that purpose.

“I'm sorry, son,” he said. “It's good toast, but I don't think I'm going to be able to eat it.”

“Shit, Dad,” Marlon said.

II

“
M
ILES ZANE HAS
dropped off the face of the earth,” said McMahon.

It had been a couple weeks since they'd heard from Miles, but Dirk doubted that he'd fled. Miles might have been
in
the earth, or, more likely, he was spooked and lying low. Dirk said this to McMahon. McMahon was old school, also just old, tall, still in pretty good shape; he had a certain type of old white-guy style. He got a haircut every Saturday, a manicure every other. Dirk had made a study of such things, the habits of the powerful.

“I'm thinking, this is my chance for a graceful exit from undercover work,“ Dirk said. “Hell, Miles was questioning my age. And he was right. It's a young man's game. I've had to start dying my hair.”

“I don't have anybody better than you,” McMahon said. He sat on the edge of Dirk's desk, smiling as if it hurt. Dirk was fairly certain McMahon was studying his hair. He wished he hadn't mentioned the dye. It was like exposing a wound.

“I knew this day would come,” McMahon said.

“What day?”

“The day you wanted a desk job.”

“Did I say anything about a desk job?”

“I'm sixty-four years old, Dirk. Next year they force me out.” He paused. “How would you feel about my desk?”

“How would I feel about it? As in, how would I feel about sitting behind it and running the office?”

McMahon nodded.

“I'll have to think about that,” Dirk said, a little flabbergasted, both by the honor and by the burden. He could think of a handful of guys, all older, all white, who wanted the job and were ahead of him in line. He mentioned two of them.

“Good men,” McMahon said. “Also, no geniuses. And with what's going on in this city, we need brains.”

“Any city,” Dirk said.

“You been out to Dearborn lately?” McMahon asked.

He had. Dearborn, the home of Ford and Arabic street signs. Not many brothers out there, which, of course, had always been old man Ford's design. Keeping Arabs out had probably never occurred to him.

“One of the guys that tried to blow up the World Trade Center last year, his whole family lives out there. Mother, father, three sisters, uncles, aunts, you name it. We need the kind of work you do, and I don't see Kreiler or Jurgys running the Arab special agents we're going to have to find. And you might like it, management. You could stop dyeing your hair.”

“I don't like wearing suits,” Dirk said. He was stalling, trying to think it through. If he got the job, there'd be a lot of pissed-off white guys. His pay would go up. His hours would be normal.

“You look good in a suit.” McMahon stood up from his desk. “How 'bout putting Miles Zane away, and we'll make a change. I'll start grooming you myself.”

“We don't even know where Miles is,” Dirk said.

“He'll turn up,” McMahon said. “You said so yourself.”

• • •

N
ATALIE CALLED TO
say she was engaged, so Dirk drove out to Bloomfield Hills to have dinner with her at their mother's. It was a last-minute thing on a school night; Shelly had decided that Michelle should stay home. Shelly was cool toward Dirk's white family; she felt they didn't pay him the proper respect, the short notice of this invitation being just the latest evidence. Dirk had to make a choice, so he told his mother he would come without his wife and daughter. Going alone seemed the best way to keep everyone happy, or at least not terribly unhappy. He figured within a family like his you couldn't ask for more.

Bloomfield Hills was like a different country. No, Dirk decided, it was more than that. Travel across the river to Windsor, Ontario, and it seemed more like Detroit than Bloomfield, with all the big trees and clean streets, gas that cost forty cents more a gallon, and plenty of luxury German and Japanese cars. Of course none of the Bloomfield doctors and lawyers had dark-tinted windows or twenty-inch wheels.

His mother lived on a road off Lone Pine, which was 17 Mile. Ten miles from his house, and also light-years away. This was a neighborhood of Colonial homes and newer McMansions. What was left of the forest primeval was in its full glory, magnificent trees that threw shade across the streets. He didn't notice the cop till the guy tweaked his siren.

There were two ways to play it. One, show him the FBI badge when he came up, or two, play dumb till things got further along. Dirk decided on the latter. He wasn't in a hurry.

“License and registration, proof of insurance,” said the cop. Not even a “please.” He was pasty white and young, maybe not yet thirty. Dirk had papers in the name of Barry Stevens and Dirk Burton, the latter hidden. He fished them out from under the seat.

The cop retreated, sat in his car, then returned and handed everything back. “Mr. Burton, where are you going?”

“Perhaps first you'd tell me why you stopped me.”

“You were driving suspiciously.”

That was a new one. “Can you explain?” Dirk asked.

“I did.”

“You had no probable cause.”

“Like I said,” said the kid. “You were driving odd.”

Dirk held up his badge and the kid actually stepped back. “I think,” Dirk said, “that you didn't like the look of my car, and that you stopped me without probable cause, and that all I have to do to get you in a whole lot of trouble is to make a phone call from my office.”

The cop considered this. Finally he said, “What do you want?”

“I want you to ask me to let you go,” Dirk said.

“What?”

“Say, ‘I'm sorry, sir, I made a mistake. Would you let me off this one time? I won't do it again.' ”

It was as if the cop wanted to speak but couldn't.

“And it would be good if you begged a little, you know?” Dirk suggested. “So you sound contrite.”

“I don't have to put up with this,” said the cop.

“No, but consider the consequences of not putting up with it.”

It was a calculation black people made all the time; without the badge, Dirk would be making it at this very moment. He could see the young cop struggling to come to the obvious conclusion. “I made a mistake,” he said finally. “Please, would you let me off this one time, please?”

Dirk liked the extra “please.” “Okay,” he said, “but don't let me again catch you pulling over a brother for no reason.”

The cop stared. Dirk could feel the hatred, which was some small comfort. This wasn't the first time he'd given a white cop a hard time. It was never as satisfying as he hoped.

“For the record,” Dirk said, “I'm going to see my mother.”

• • •

D
ESPITE THE STOP,
he got to the house early. His mother wasn't home, Natalie wasn't there, but Arthur, his mother's husband, came out to meet him in the driveway. Dirk was shocked, Arthur looked so frail, ghostly. He had colon cancer, and it obviously wasn't going well. He wore khakis cinched tight and a T-shirt that hung on his shoulders as it would have on a wire hanger.

“You look bigger every time I see you,” Arthur said.

“You know, Arthur, that's not something you say to a man who's forty,” Dirk said.

“C'mon inside.”

They sat in the kitchen, as they always did. It was odd, because the rest of the house was so nice. Perhaps when you got to a certain level of opulence you desired less. Arthur wanted to know details of the drug trade. He read articles in medical journals about the effects of crack and crystal meth. He knew the science of it, but it was the social aspects that interested him.

“Well, I'm getting out of the risk-your-life business,” Dirk said.

“You're quitting the FBI?”

“No, just undercover work. It's a young man's game.”

“Life is a young man's game.” Arthur asked about Shelly and Michelle. Dirk talked for a while, thinking he could really use a beer. Finally he asked for one.

“Good idea.” Arthur started to get up, but Dirk held him in place with an upraised palm. He went to the refrigerator, opened the stainless steel door, and found two St. Pauli Girls.

“So you're marrying off Natalie,” Dirk said.

“Just in time.”

Dirk heard the wrong tone in his voice, just as he had when he had talked to Natalie. He sat down with the beers.

“You don't sound any more sure of it than Natalie does.”

Arthur attempted a smile.

His mother arrived almost forty-five minutes late. “So tell me everything,” she said.

He always felt the mystery of his life most when he was with his mother. He hadn't forgiven her, exactly, because he couldn't understand why she'd done what she'd done. He knew she believed her actions were justified, and this softened things, even if it didn't make them clear. When he thought of Michelle he couldn't imagine letting someone else raise his child, and yet both of his parents had made that choice. “Don't spend your life waiting for Tina to get in touch with her feelings,” Natalie had advised, and that deepened the mystery, because Nat seemed to be angrier with their mother than Dirk, as though she couldn't forgive her mother for keeping her.

“It's really too bad Michelle and Shelly couldn't come,” Tina said. “I haven't seen Michelle for ages.”

Give me more than a five-hour notice,
he thought, but he held it in. He smiled. White people, he knew, liked to see him smile.

III

M
ARLON WAS THINKING
of Z. He got the cancer, and they radiated the stuffing out of him, till that bushy 'fro melted right off his head and his skin started to look like rolling paper, the burned kind right before it disintegrates. No one in the neighborhood knew what to do. You felt bad for the guy, but going to his house and sitting with him while he looked so bad and couldn't do anything was like dying yourself. Z's mom was grateful when Marlon came, and this made it even worse, on account of how she'd hated the old neighborhood crew every second that Z had been healthy.

But then Z got a little better and one afternoon his mother let him out. Marlon was there, and Eric, and Ricky Spooner. They all walked down to Eric's house, four doors away but like a mile for Z. Z said he weighed fifty-eight pounds. They were all twelve then. Eric produced a joint.

“Try this,” he said. “Makes you want to eat.”

It was offered around and no one would take it, so Eric lit the joint himself and took a hit. “Jesus,” he said. “Ain't gonna kill you. Gonna be sick, might as well be high.”

It was solid logic, Marlon thought. Z tried the joint and had a coughing fit. It spoke to his evident frailty that no one laughed at him. Eric even coached him on what to do. Z tried a second time and was able to hold down some smoke. From that point on he smoked regularly. And he got better.

Marlon figured he had to try the same thing for his father. He had to do something. He couldn't just watch his father fade away. There was irony in this, because all along he'd been wishing his father would get off his case and now the old man was too weak to do anything but sit on the couch, and it was still no good. It made Marlon wonder if you didn't need the push-back, if life meant nothing without the resistance.