You Don't Have to Live Like This (28 page)

“No way.”

“I don’t know what to do,” I said and sat down on the porch.

“Is Walter around?”

But Walter and Susie were out; we tried the bell.

“Just sit here and wait for the police. It will take me half an hour to drop off Michael and come back.”

“I’m hungry,” Michael said.

“Just get in the car.”

“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “It will take more than half an hour this time of day. Five o’clock traffic.”

But Tony drove off anyway and eventually I changed my mind and went inside. “Nolan, Nolan,” I called out, from the stairs. There wasn’t any answer. We had left the front door open, at least
it was open when I reached the landing, and I walked in. Nolan lay on his side, with his legs swiveled over, so that both of his shoes and both of his shoulders touched the floor, but his hips stuck out. Lying like that he looked a little fat, like a strong middle-aged black man who had put on weight. The bandage from his face had stuck to his shirt. He was never very dark-skinned, and his skin had a washed-out whitish look, like when you put too much milk into a cup of tea. There was a crust of drying spit around his mouth.

“Nolan,” I said again, then sat down on my knees and felt his neck for a pulse. Some gestures are tender just because the motion itself needs gentleness. I had trouble at first, there’s a lot of loose skin and tissue, and the cords in his throat were stretched by the angle of his head. But he was breathing, his lips moved, and then I found his pulse, which was steady enough and felt like a small gulp of blood, one after another. The human machine was operating fine and the rest of him couldn’t get in the way of whatever I felt for him. I sat like that I don’t know how long, until I heard the sirens coming nearer.

T
he cops came, the ambulance came, doctors did their business and loaded Nolan up on a stretcher—he’s a big guy, you could feel how heavy he is, the way they carried him down the stairs. One of the cops rode along in the ambulance, they set the sirens off, the squad car followed, and another car drove me to the station to make a statement. I called Beatrice from the road, and about twenty minutes later, Tony showed up with Mel Hauser.

I’d been to this station before, on Beaubien Street, a big square grand old building, like a town hall. It’s where they took my fingerprints for the education board. This time they emptied out my pockets and checked my wallet and removed my shoes. They took my fingerprints again and lined me up against a blank wall and photographed me looking different ways—mug shots.

Tony got the same treatment, but he liked these guys or at least pretended to. These were working-class Detroit city cops. One of them had a buzz cut and glasses, his face was reddish, his hair, too, and his chin ran down his neck in tough folds. A fat strong medium-size guy named Lisicki. Mel knew him—it was a good idea bringing him along. They gave me my shit back and pointed to a row of plastic chairs. It was like waiting in a hospital waiting room.

Then Beatrice came in with a lawyer, Dan Korobkin, a skinny Jewish guy with quick expressions and a reasonable amount of hair. Robert James wanted somebody around to talk me through the legal process. It turned out this lawyer knew my brother a little, Brad was two years ahead of him at Chicago. At least, this is what Korobkin told me. He sat next to me, on one side, Beatrice on the other.

“Is there anybody you want me to call?” she said. “I can let them know.”

Korobkin said, “What happens now is a lot of procedural stuff, a lot of paperwork. They’ll take a statement. You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to answer, and if you feel like talking something over with me first, we can find a space. After that my main priority is to get you home.”

At one point he went to the bathroom, and Beatrice leaned over and said, “So what the fuck happened.” Along with the makeup, which she hadn’t taken off, she had a strong scent of perfume on her, which was mixed in with her own smell—also strong on a hot day. God knows I must have stunk, too.

“Nolan saw Michael wandering around, you know, Tony’s kid, and got him into his car somehow, because he thought he was Robert’s. This was at Robert’s house. Tony and I had gone out to lunch and left Michael behind. And then when we came back he was gone. So we got in the car and started looking for him. Anyway, Nolan ended up at my place, because he knows I’m a friend of Robert’s, and I guess he wanted to make some kind of communication—some kind of threat. He’s pissed off about the Meacher thing. I tried to explain that Michael was Tony’s kid, he had nothing to do with Robert, but by that point everybody was shouting. I got them inside, into my place, but they kept screaming at each other. I tried to call the police but Nolan took the phone away, physically, by
force, and then Tony and Nolan started going at it. I didn’t see the whole thing, I had to step out. But when I came back they were rolling around on the floor. Nolan’s already a little beat up, and Tony caught him in the— He had this bandage on his face that came away, and that must have hurt, because he just kind of lay there and Tony started kicking him, and I had to pull him away. Because by that stage Nolan was out cold. He lives with his mom just down the road and I figured he might have left the kid there, so we went to look, and the kid was there, and we took him away. Then Tony drove him home and I kind of sat with Nolan until the ambulance arrived. That’s the best I can piece it together. The whole thing’s a big fucking mess. Where were you? You look all dressed up.”

“Downtown. I had a meeting. Some guy called Krause from Goldman Sachs.”

“I think we got lucky, it could have been much worse. I think it’s going to be okay.”

“For who?” she said.

Tony kept talking, he seemed in a good mood. “The motherfucker took my kid,” he said to Lisicki.

“I don’t want to hear it. Mel, tell him to shut up.”

“Shut up.”

“Look, I didn’t do anything, he was beating the shit out of me. But what I’m saying is, he had it coming. The son of a bitch definitely had it coming. Don’t expect me to feel bad about it.”

“I don’t give a fuck what you feel. Keep it to yourself.”

“Does anyone know how Nolan is doing?”

“What’s that?”

“Does anyone know how Nolan is doing?” I said again, as loud as I could, but I don’t think it came out clear. I was all talked out.

Lisicki said, “Nobody knows.”

I felt like I was coming down with a cold. My bones ached, and
there was a flat pain, like a low noise you can’t get out of your head, running from my butt to my knees. A loose wire of nerves that kept shorting. Beatrice put her arm around me, to warm me up, she said. I must have been shivering—on a hot June day that was still waiting for rain. I had the sense for the first time in years, since I was a kid maybe, that my face was something physical. That the bones of my face were a wall and my mouth was a door and I didn’t have to come out if I didn’t want to. Nobody could force me.

But then they called me in to make a statement, and I remembered my brother’s old joke about my stories. How I said, this and then this and then this.

AS SOON AS I GOT
home I called Gloria, but the cabins they were staying in didn’t have phones—and her cell had no reception. It went straight to voicemail. So when she came back Friday night I had to tell her about the whole business. The story had been kind of accumulating in me over the past few days, and I knew it would come out rehearsed, I knew I would sound formal and underemotional and overconsiderate, and that’s how I sounded. But I had to tell her anyway. The other problem was she came back brimming with her own hard-to-follow stories, about people I didn’t know and which didn’t seem very important, relatively speaking. But I waited for her to tell them anyway, patiently. She sensed my patience, too, and that pissed her off even before I started.

So right from the beginning we fought about the whole damn thing.

“I don’t understand what happened,” she said. “Nolan passed out?”

“Yes.”

“And you left him there, for how long?”

“About ten minutes, fifteen minutes.”

“You’ve got to realize how upsetting this is for me,” she said.

“What do you mean, for you?”

“This is personal for me. You understand that. Nolan’s my friend.”

“He’s a friend of mine, too—”

“Apparently not. But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“You mean your dad.”

“Don’t say it. I mean you, I mean you . . .” She was crying and kind of hitting me, which I recognized as a good sign, because if she could take it out on me, she could probably let it out, too. But all of this sounds more calculating than I felt. I was very upset. I tried to tell her this, I wanted to make it clear, but it came out as more of a statement of fact than I would have liked, not an outburst of feeling, and she had limited sympathy.

I said to her, “It seems to me that your first port of—concern should be me, should be what happened to me and what I’m going through . . .”

“What are you going through, Marny?”

“This, for one thing.”

“You need to toughen up then. If you think this is bad.”

She had cried herself out, but underneath the softness was more hardness. I got a sense of that, too. You live with somebody, in a state of real intimacy, you sleep in her bed (we were at Gloria’s place; she was unpacking), you watch TV together, you leave the bathroom door open, and then you realize she can step out of this intimacy if she wants, she can make decisions about it. At least since I was at her place she couldn’t go home. And she couldn’t bring herself to kick me out either, that was a bridge too far. So I knew that at some point that night we would lie down in bed together, in close proximity, with the light off, which gave a reasonable chance
for our actual real affection for each other to come out, like some kind of hedgehog in the dark. Which is what happened.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she said. “I’m not really mad at you. I’m just worried about Nolan, I’ve known him for a long time, and it’s confusing for me that you’re in the middle of this. I feel like I have to take sides, and somehow I’m on the wrong side. Just lying here like this with you.”

“So let’s not have sides,” I said.

N
olan turned out to be okay—medically, I mean. He regained consciousness in the ambulance; the diagnosis was severe concussion. I didn’t think Tony kicked him that hard, but who knows. Nolan used to play football, free safety, he had a history of concussions, and this is one of those repetitive things, where the more you get it, the more vulnerable you are. It’s a complex field; the damage isn’t always structural. At least, the doctors disagree about that—a lot of what goes on is at the micro level. Synapses. Neuropsychiatry. You become predisposed. I started reading up on all this stuff; there were stories in the newspaper, too.

I tried to remember exactly what had happened. Nolan was kind of getting up, he was halfway up when Tony kicked him. His head snapped back when he hit the ground. This was an image that replayed itself in my mind. Apart from anything else because people kept asking me about it. Korobkin, Lisicki. Beatrice and Robert James. When you describe something often enough you remember what you describe and not what you saw.

They kept him overnight at the hospital, under police guard. His medical problems weren’t the issue. Undressing him, the nurses found a gun. It wasn’t loaded, but it wasn’t licensed either, and
Korobkin said it could add a minimum of two years to his sentence. If he was convicted, that is. In which case there would be a lot of technical code to work through, a complicated points system. It was like scoring ice skating, except instead of medals they gave you months and years. The worst-case scenario was life in prison with the possibility of parole, but there were mitigating circumstances. Michael didn’t get hurt and the whole thing played out very quickly. Little details, like leaving the kid at his mother’s house, were likely to sit well with a judge. But the gun didn’t help, and Nolan also had a criminal record. One count of disturbing the peace, and a misdemeanor drug charge he picked up in college. That didn’t help either. Korobkin figured he could be looking at ten years.

When the doctors released him, the cops took over, and a judge set bail—$100,000. Nolan didn’t have access to that kind of money. They couldn’t even raise 10 percent for the bondsman.

I wanted to visit him in jail, but Korobkin advised against. I saw a lot of this guy over the next ten months, because what happened next happened in different stages, it took time, there were court appearances, things to sign, meetings with lawyers. It became an aspect of my life but not my whole life, though it affected the rest of my life, too.

Korobkin liked to talk baseball to me. He had Tigers season tickets, and every time I saw him, we spent maybe half the conversation on baseball. For a while it looked like the Tigers had a chance of making the playoffs, Cabrera was having a great year, knocking it all over the park. And Verlander put up his usual strong numbers. He got called up for the All-Star Game at the last minute. “What you need in this league,” Korobkin said, “is a slugger and an ace, and we have both.” But then guys got hurt and the White Sox put clear water between them, before the Twins pulled away. I had to listen to his complaining, too.

He offered to take me to a ball game, but I said no.

“You can talk about the game,” I said, “but don’t make me watch it.”

“You know who you should have heard call a ball game? I’ll tell you who.” Korobkin was a big Ernie Harwell fan, the old Tigers broadcaster, who’d died in May. “He was one of those play-by-play announcers they should study in high school English classes. When a guy struck out looking, Ernie used to say, he stood there like a house by the side of the road.”

The case was slowly taking shape but all of this takes an unbelievable length of time. The first thing you realize is, you want this thing resolved so you can move on with your life, but you have to live your life anyway because this thing is about to become a part of it. Kidnapping is a felony offense, even if the whole business doesn’t last but a couple of hours, even if no one gets hurt, and the political context looked bad for Nolan. I mean, what he said to me, “I’m just making him sweat a little,” which went towards motive. Korobkin asked me repeatedly about this line, and what Nolan said afterwards, about applying pressure. I had motives, too, operating at cross-purposes to each other, and from the beginning I decided to drown out the noise by concentrating as much as possible on telling the truth. But for reasons that slowly became clear this was unsatisfactory.

I kept trying to understand what had happened, and the law was one way of understanding it. But I felt like you feel when you’re a kid and your parents tell stories about you at the dinner table. That’s not the way it was, you want to say. Even if it’s all true. Just because Nolan picked up some kid in his car, who was maybe wandering in the road or in Robert’s garden (this fact was still under dispute), and brought him to his mother’s house, where we picked him up a few hours later, Nolan was looking at ten years in jail. Maybe a
quarter of the life he had left. There seemed to be something disproportionate—I don’t just mean about the sentencing guidelines, though that, too. I mean about the way some stupid impulse, some spur of the moment thing, can become a permanent feature or scar in somebody’s life. I guess I don’t like the way facts become facts. I remembered the feeling of that hot afternoon, it was muggy, too, Tony and I were both a little drunk, and I had a hangover coming on, but what I mean is I felt like I was operating the whole time at some slight remove from reality, I didn’t have great access. We were all just floundering around, trying to get a grip on something, and now, one month, two months, three months later, that floundering turned out to be the reality, and that other thing, the thing we needed to come to terms with, might as well not have existed.

The first sign of things to come was Nolan’s release—someone posted bail. This was great for Nolan, but it meant people were raising money on his behalf, there were powerful donors, and the case was turning into a political football. People on every side kicked us around. There was a guy named Simon Kaplow, a law professor at Wayne State, who had been involved in local politics for years. He wrote an op-ed piece in the
Free Press
, he showed up on Channel 7 news. There was a vacancy on the city council, Dee Dee McIlvane had just stepped down, and Kaplow tried to turn the election into a referendum on the five neighborhoods. He backed a woman named Molly Brinkley, a former superintendent of schools; Gloria knew her a little bit. She said, “Publicly I like everything about Molly. She’s got a lot of good ideas, I think she’s honest, she works hard, she stands for the right things, but she’s also personally a real mean little person, she’s petty, she bears grudges, she’s manipulative, she’s not somebody I’d like to have any kind of business with.”

It seemed like every couple of days we saw her face on TV, making her pitch. Detroit has got to get better, but who’s it got to get
better for? Who are these neighborhoods really helping out? All of this started out innocent enough, but somehow the tone changed. A group of Turkish immigrants had converted an abandoned church into a mosque and community center. There were stories about where the funding came from, there were complaints about the calls to prayer. People said they felt shut out from the community center. Maybe they did, I don’t know. They felt uncomfortable. Molly Brinkley ran a political ad, about the old church and the community it used to serve. There were photographs, interviews with old ladies. She didn’t say anything you could pin against her, she was very careful, but she got her point across, too. If it’s a choice between these two groups of people . . . that was her point. Even Gloria said, “Something is happening to this woman, I don’t recognize her.”

Then Nolan filed charges against Tony, for assault. The only one off the hook was me.

I felt guilty about that, too. And kept thinking about what Tony said to me, “You didn’t do shit.” Like it was some kind of failure of courage or character to stay out of the way of the legal battle. Because in some way, and I felt this strongly, it seemed to me I was in the middle of the whole thing. Yet nobody wanted to take me on. Korobkin was one of Robert’s guys. Apart from anything else Robert worried about a civil suit and wanted somebody checking up on me, on what I said. Everybody had lawyers, Tony had his lawyer, Nolan had lawyers, we had acquired these representatives and advocates and stand-ins who spoke their own language and managed to fight our battles in such a way that we hardly had to be present at all.

Korobkin asked me not to make contact with the other parties, but it seemed to me there were human things going on here I had to pay attention to. So I went to see Mrs. Smith.

By this point it was mid-July, a dripping, not very hot or cold but uncomfortable close overcast summer afternoon. Just after lunch—Gloria was seeing one of her sorority sisters. I had my lunch and then I thought, screw it, and walked the hundred yards to Nolan’s house.

His mother answered the door. “I was wondering when you would turn up,” she said.

“I’ve been meaning to.”

We went into the kitchen and Mrs. Smith put the coffee on. “Clarence is getting into his baking,” she said and pushed over a tray of sugar cookies cut into half-moons and stars. I took a mincing little bite. She fussed around with the coffee and then she poured me a cup and poured herself a cup and sat down. “Let me say first things first. When Nolan dropped that boy off, I had no idea. He said he was helping out a friend. So let me apologize for that. Let me apologize for getting you mixed up. When I heard what he did, I wanted to say, excuse me, I’ll handle this, you come here, son. You are in big trouble. But it’s not up to me. I got no say, and they talking about a life sentence. It doesn’t add up. Nolan swears to me that boy was walking in the city street. He says the kid didn’t know his way home. I can’t bring myself to disbelieve him. Now I am mad as hell about what he did next, but the only one who got hurt here is my son. That’s a fact.”

“I don’t know if you blame me for that.”

“I’m done blaming. I don’t even blame the other guy, Carnesecca. If somebody took Clarence, what do you think Nolan would do. Everybody needs to calm down. But these lawyers, they don’t let you talk.”

“That’s why I came here today.”

And she took my hand, which was on the table, in both her old-woman hands, which were very dry and warm. There was flour on
them, that’s partly why they seemed so dry. After a minute she let me go.

At one point Nolan came in with Clarence. They had just been taking the dog to the park. “What’s he want?” Nolan said. Almost two months later, you could still see the scar on his face, a patch of lighter skin, as if it was dusted with flour, too. But that wasn’t me or Tony, that was Kurt Stangel, when they fought over the baseball bat.

“He doesn’t want anything. He’s paying a visit.”

“The lawyer tells me not to see you,” I said.

“I guess you’re all grown up now. Come on, Clarence. Wash hands.”

“Don’t listen to him, Greg,” Mrs. Smith told me, while they went to the bathroom. “He’s just worried. If he goes to jail, how old is Clarence going to be when he gets out.”

In fact, I started seeing Nolan more regularly after that. We even went running once. I had this idea, maybe it was a stupid idea, that Tony and Nolan could work out their differences personally, and leave the law out of it. Korobkin explained to me, the law isn’t interested in them personally. But I had an answer for that, too. The best way to fight cynicism is with deeper cynicism. These guys all know each other, I said. Everything’s personal. Robert and Larry Oh have lunch together, they have mutual interests, they talk about trade-offs. I just have to persuade all the different parties what their interests are. But Korobkin shook his head. You’ve been watching too much TV, he said. And the truth is nobody wanted to work out their differences, they wanted to fight them out.

We jogged around the neighborhood, past Butzel Park, as far as Mack Avenue. I liked seeing the houses at different stages of being worked on, the gardens in progress, guys painting fences or washing their cars on a Saturday afternoon, women outside with the kids and the plastic toys. Of course all this set Nolan off. We didn’t
talk about the case much but we talked around it. I wanted to know what made him so angry; I didn’t get it. These places were scary places before people like me came along, the houses were standing empty, nature was taking over. It’s kind of terrifying, I said, how quickly weeds grow; certain trees as well. All of this architecture, which seems like such a permanent feature of the landscape, needs constant updating, home improvement, middle-class pride and ambition, or the landscape swallows it up. After a few years.

“Who said I’m angry?” Nolan said. “You got some guy setting up a roadblock outside my house, and when I complain to him, he beats the shit out of me. Some other guy kicks me in the head. And I’m the one going to jail. But if you want to talk about architecture, let’s talk about that.”

“You complained to him with a baseball bat.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I like these houses. When you all move out, we can move in.”

“Who’s we?”

The truth is, Nolan wasn’t in great shape; he looked heavy, his color was bad, his breathing sounded anxious. When we got to Mack and Conner he had to stop, so we went into the McDonald’s for refueling. I had a cup of coffee but he needed some sugar in his blood and ate two or three little hot apple pies.

We sat outside at one of those metal tables, sweating in the August heat, in the traffic noise. I said, “This city wasn’t always a black city.”

“When the white people made enough money, they moved out.”

“So now they want to move back in. And by the way, it isn’t only whites.”

“How much money have you people brought to this city that you didn’t spend on yourselves? On your schools and your houses and your neighborhoods?”

“You live in it, too. There have been jobs.”

“Mowing lawns. Security.”

From where we were sitting, we could see the old warehouse across the parking lot; a black guy in a brown uniform sat on a folding chair outside the office door, in the sunshine.