The Switch

by Elmore Leonard

  The Detroit patrolman flipped on his Super Fireballs, took the radio mike off the hook.

  Before he could say a word he heard the gunfire . . . saw the fat guy on the porch, the guy holding his belly and blazing away with a revolver, shooting at the black car running away, the car nearly gone. Where in the hell was it? Up by the animal barns already.

  The Detroit patrolman said to his mike, eyes staring through the windshield, “Seven four four two . . . in the 1,000 block of State Fair east of Woodward. Request immediate backup. We got some kind of wild asshole here firing a revolver.”

  There were traces of yellow paint on the grille of the Hornet, from the sign that told about parking at Gate No. 5, the gate the car came darting out to turn right into Woodward Avenue. Seconds later they were cresting the overpass at Eight Mile Road, moving north into the suburbs. The Salem cigarette billboard against the sky, higher than the overpass, told them it was exactly 1:55.

  Mickey had buttoned her shirt. She held her bra balled in both hands, her hands resting in her lap. She said, “Where’re you taking me?”

  “Where’m I taking you?” Louis looked at her, surprised. “I’m taking you home.”

  Neither of them spoke or looked at each other after that. They seemed interested in the traffic and the franchised food places, the drive-ins and car-dealer lots, moving through Ferndale, Royal Oak, Pleasant Ridge, some more of Royal Oak, out past the Mile Roads toward Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills.

  In a little while Louis began to relax. He felt relieved. He didn’t want to think about anything right now. He saw familiar signs and places, N & S Automotive. He began thinking of Mopars and Chevies and a ‘64 Barracuda with a blown Hemi in the rear end, “Hemi Under Glass,” one of the first of the dragstrip showcars that did wheelies. He had seen it out at Detroit Dragway . . . on the way to Toledo . . . you went past on I-75 all the way to Miami. Then came back.

  He said, “Right here, this stretch of North Woodward, used to be called the street-racing capital of the world. You know that?”

  Mickey looked at him then. She said, “I don’t want to go home.”

  18

  * * *

  LOUIS TRIED TO IMAGINE EXPLAINING IT TO ORDELL.

  “What was I supposed to do, tell her get out of the car?”

  Ordell would say, “Yes. She wouldn’t get out, you push her out.”

  He’d say, “I know but, she didn’t have any shoes on. She was sitting there holding her bra all bunched up. I didn’t know where else to take her. She looked like she was in a daze and I couldn’t think of any place.”

  Ordell would say to their lawyer, “This man’s crazy. He’s gonna get out for being mentally retarded and I’m gonna get ten to twenty-five.”

  Louis took Mickey to Ordell’s big four-bedroom apartment overlooking Palmer Park. He sat her down in the living room in the La-Z-Boy, put her bare feet up on the Magic Ottoman that rose out of the chair and got her a vodka and tonic. She drank it down in about two minutes and he got her another one. She didn’t ask where they were; she didn’t ask him anything. She still seemed in a daze. Louis got himself a drink and put his feet on the coffee table where the box of Halloween masks was still sitting, now with a bunched-up bra lying next to the box. They sat there for awhile and didn’t say anything.

  What happened after that, during the afternoon and evening, Ordell wouldn’t believe it if he told him.

  Mickey started talking.

  She said, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  Louis could have said something, a lot, but he didn’t.

  “I don’t know what to say to my husband. I keep thinking about it. I think, after we say the first few things, like how are you and all, then there won’t be anything to say and everything will be the same again.” There was a long silence as she sat there holding her drink.

  Louis said, “Well, you’ll have enough to talk about,” thinking, Jesus—“He’ll want to know all about it.”

  “No, he won’t.”

  “He’ll ask you things. How you were treated—”

  “Uh-unh. He’ll ask me how I am, he’ll say well, why don’t you get some rest. And put it out of his mind.”

  “If you feel like telling him about it,” Louis said—actually giving her advice; he couldn’t believe it—“then tell him.”

  “He won’t listen. He’ll be moody for a day or so and then, it’ll be like it never happened.”

  “Well, then grab him by the front of the shirt, say, Hey, listen, I got something to tell you.”

  She shook her head. “He won’t listen. I know.”

  “Why not? I mean something happens to his wife—what’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s an asshole,” Mickey said. She heard Louis say, “Oh,” but she wasn’t listening to Louis; she continued to hear the word she had said out loud for the first time in her life and began wondering if she could improve on it.

  “He’s a pure asshole.” No, “pure” didn’t do anything for it. She said, “Do you know what I mean?”

  “Sure,” Louis said. “Unless what you really mean, he’s a prick.”

  “He probably is at work, dealing with employees. But in life he’s . . . the other.” Losing her nerve again she brought it back quickly. “An asshole.”

  “Well—” Louis didn’t know what to say. “You got a nice house, you got plenty of money—”

  “You mean so be grateful? You sound like my mother. Do you have a cigarette?”

  “I’ll look,” Louis said. He pulled himself up and walked out of the living room.

  Maybe they’d get along, Mickey thought. If her mother didn’t know what Louis did for a living. (What did he do?) Tell mom he had an important position with GM, at the Tech Center. Her mother would say, “That’s nice.” Her dad would say, “Oh? I had some good friends at GM belonged to the Detroit Golf Club. Where do you play, Louis?”

  “I couldn’t find any regular ones. How about one of these?” He was holding several joints in the palm of his hand.

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Yeah, good stuff. I think Colombian.”

  “I’ve never smoked it before.”

  “Colombian? It’s not that different you’d taste it.” He let them roll out of his hand onto the coffee table.

  “Do you smoke it all the time?”

  “No, once in awhile,” Louis said. “Or like if I’m with somebody, a girl, you know, and we want to get a little high first.”

  “Do you use other drugs?”

  “No hard stuff, no. Coke maybe, but not as an every week thing. Maybe if it’s there, somebody offers it.”

  “I’d like to try the grass,” Mickey said.

  As Louis got up he seemed to realize what she meant. “You never smoked before?”

  “Uh-unh.” She watched him pick up matches from the table and light the cigarette, the twisted end flaming for a moment. As he handed it to her she said, “What do you do?”

  “You smoke it.”

  “I mean how?”

  “The way you smoke your True greens. It’ll work.”

  “Don’t you use a—what do you call it, the thing you hold the joint with?”

  “A roach clip? If you’re poor. No, we got plenty of grass. It gets down, throw it away and have another. But I think one’ll do the job.”

  Mickey inhaled the cigarette. She didn’t like the smell. She handed it to Louis who took a drag, handed it back and picked up their empty glasses. She noticed, watching him as he walked out of the room, he didn’t exhale. She drew on the cigarette and tried holding in the smoke. When Louis came back with fresh drinks she said, a little surprised or disappointed, “I don’t feel anything.”

  “Well, you got time,” Louis said. “You don’t want to go home we can always sit around and get stoned.”

  She said, “I don’t understand. You know it? There’s so goddamn much I don’t understand. Do you?”

  “Be hap
py,” Louis said. “What else you want?”

  “What else do you want?” She reached out the joint and Louis reached out a hand and she passed him the cigarette.

  “Money,” Louis said. “That’s all.”

  “Ooooh no,” Mickey said. “That’s what everybody thinks, but money has nothing to do with happiness. What about your health?”

  “Well, say I had a yacht,” Louis said, “great big cruiser. See, I could sit on the fantail there and throw up and have the maid bring me an Alka-Seltzer and it would beat the shit out of laying in the weeds down on Michigan Avenue. I know a guy I went to school with, he ended up down there drinking Thunderbird, no teeth, half his stomach taken out. I was down at one of those Ethnic Festivals, you know, on the river? I think it was the Polish or the Ukrainian Festival. I see him there, filthy dirty, staggering around, I couldn’t believe it. I said to myself, I’m never gonna be like that, ever.”

  Mickey was surprised at the way Louis let the cigarette burn as he spoke, not worrying about wasting it. She said, “He could’ve had money and lost it because he was drinking.”

  “He didn’t have shit,” Louis said. “He worked at Sears in automotive service, putting on the new polyglass radials. He was frustrated because he didn’t have any money.”

  “Why didn’t he get another job?”

  “Where?” Louis passed the cigarette to her and she kept it.

  “I don’t know. Where do people work? They work all over, do all kinds of things.”

  “You ever work?”

  “Of course I worked.”

  “Where?”

  “At Saks.”

  “How long?”

  “Well, the last time”—the only time—“it was a little more than five weeks.”

  “Five weeks?”

  “I was part-time. A flyer. Let me tell you something,” Mickey said, “you talk about frustration—”

  “Five weeks—”

  “Let me tell you, okay? You think you can sit quietly and not open your mouth and listen for a change?”

  “Go ahead, tell me.”

  “God, I left my purse there.”

  “Richard’ll go through it, see if you got any Tampax or a diaphragm.”

  “I was praying all these past four days I wouldn’t get the curse. I’m overdue.”

  “Maybe you’re pregnant.”

  “No way. God, I hate that expression. No way. I mean there isn’t any possible way I could be. Well, he can have it—God, he was awful. He smelled. I know my wallet’s at home on the kitchen table, with my car keys.”

  “So you had this terrible frustrating job—”

  “You weren’t allowed to carry a purse,” Mickey said. “You had to carry a Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag so this little snip in Security could look in it if you were walking around the store or you were leaving and make sure you weren’t stealing anything.”

  “I bet there were ways,” Louis said.

  “She was a little snippy snitch,” Mickey said. “Fat little company snitch, with acne.”

  “I can see her,” Louis said.

  “She’d say”—Mickey effected a snippy tone—” ‘You have anything in that bag?’ And pull it, almost pull it away from you, and look inside.”

  “I’d tell her to put it where the sun don’t shine,” Louis said.

  “I’d say, ‘No, I don’t have anything in it. I carry it around empty, you dumb shit.’ That’s what I wanted to say.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Why didn’t I? I’d get fired.”

  “So, you were just working there for fun, were you?”

  “I was proving something to myself.”

  “When was this, before you were married?”

  “Last year.”

  “Jesus Christ, you’re living in that big fucking house, you drive your Grand Prix to work—”

  “It wasn’t for money, you dumb shit. No, it wasn’t for that at all.”

  “What was it for?” He got up and left.

  What was it for?

  To get out in the world. No, he wouldn’t accept that, Saks Fifth Avenue as the world, or even as a step into it. But it was.

  He came back in with two fresh drinks. She didn’t remember finishing the last one.

  “I still don’t feel it,” Mickey said, “the grass. Maybe just a teeny bit.”

  “A teeny weeny bit?” Louis said.

  “A teeny-weeny weeny weeny-weeny bit,” Mickey said. “What got me the most wasn’t the snitch with the acne or the other salesgirls in Young Circle who’d, you’d have a customer and they’d try and steal her after you practically broke your ass showing her clothes. The woman’d say, ‘Oh, now, what goes with this?’ Helpless, making you think for her. Or this fat fat broad would come in, 5-feet tall weighing about 200 pounds and she’d ask for, because she’s only 5 feet or about 4­11?, she’d ask for petite.” A nasal sound. “ ‘Let me see what you have in Petite.’ Petite, she couldn’t get a petite over her left boob. The slobs you had to wait on—they’d take a bunch of dresses and things into the booth, walk out and leave everything on the floor. But the worst, you know what the very worst was? What really got me?”

  “What?” Louis said.

  “These women who threw their charge plates at you.”

  “They threw’em at you, huh?” Louis said.

  “They’d sort of flip them.” Mickey twisted sideways in the chair, raising her shoulder and gave him a backhand motion with her hand. “Like that. Like, ‘I’m hot shit, I’ve got this Saks charge plate.’ Christ, who doesn’t?”

  “You throw it back?”

  “No, I didn’t throw it back.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I wanted to. God, I wanted to so bad.”

  “So you quit instead,” Louis said.

  “I couldn’t stand it.”

  “Well see, most people,” Louis said, “they don’t have that choice you did. They got to stay there and take that shit, cause they don’t have a big house to drive home to.”

  “Nobody has to take it,” Mickey said. “It isn’t worth it.”

  “No, you can steal a Grand Prix if you haven’t got one,” Louis said. “Or you can stick up supermarkets. I stuck up a liquor store one time, got $742, but it scared the shit out of me and I went back to hustling cars till I ended up in Southern Ohio Correctional. Then I did, oh, different things till I got sent to Huntsville and down there I said that’s all, man, no more.” He was silent a moment. “And here we are, huh?”

  Very seriously, squinting at him, Mickey said, “Those are prisons?”

  “They sure are. I’ve spent—well, it’s almost a quarter of my life in one joint or another. Wayne County, Dehoco, Southern Ohio, Huntsville. I haven’t been to Jackson yet and I’m not going. I promised myself that.”

  “What if you get caught?”

  “If I have to I’ll put the gun in my mouth first.”

  “Really?”

  “Cross my heart. You got a button unbuttoned there and I can almost see your titties.”

  “You wouldn’t see much,” Mickey said, looking down as she fastened the button she’d missed. “Where’s Huntsville?”

  “Texas. I was down there, I was hanging around McAllen and Brownsville waiting for a load of grass, like about a ton of it. I was never into anything like that before, but I was doing it for a man I knew, just bringing it back, not dealing or anything. I was sitting around there in the bars listening to the radio, all that cucaracha music. You get XECR Reynosa you want to hear some rock. No good jazz at all, none.”

  “You like jazz?” Mickey said.

  “We got some tapes, I’ll play ‘em,” Louis said. “You like Blue Mitchell?”

  “I don’t know if I’ve heard him. Les McCann?”

  “Yeah. Gil Evans?”

  “I think so.”

  “Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Or a little electronic voo-doo, Lonnie Liston Smith.”

  “I like Buddy Rich,” Mi
ckey said.

  “Yeah, he’s all right,” Louis said. “I’m waiting there about two weeks in Brownsville, McAllen, finally I said fuck-it, I’m going home. But by then I didn’t have any money for gas. So I said okay, I’ll go out and pick melons for a few days, maybe a week. See, the only reason I was down there I was fucking desperate and this grass was gonna make it, get me a stake. So I sign up at a place, Stanzik Farms, go out and start picking and they call a strike. Actually the strike was going on and I was hired like as a scab, buck sixty an hour. We were out in the fields and the ones on strike were up on the road forming a picket line and this Chicano girl with the union would yell at us through a bullhorn. She’d yell like, ‘Vengase! Para respecto, hombres!’ ‘Come on, for your self-respect.’ There’d be police cars there, these hotshot troopers with their sunglasses, chewing gum. Never smile. I think they teach them that at the academy. You’re out there, never smile, trooper, show you’re a human being, man. Some company people, a foreman, came by there in a pickup truck. Then this Chicano girl, Helen Mendez”—Louis grinned, shaking his head—“she was something, she’d start calling the names of people she knew out in the field, asking where their dignity was, using that word, dignity, and their respect for justice. She’d say, ‘Look at your friends here on the picket line, going hungry for the sake of a just wage.’ You should’ve heard her; she was an actress. And pretty soon some of the pickers they’d be looking at each other, and you’d see them take the sacks off their shoulder and come out of the field.”

  “And you were one of them,” Mickey said.

  “Well, I wasn’t making all that much and my goddamn back was killing me, that stoop work, Jesus—so I thought, Well, join the union. They looked like they were having a better time than we were.”

  “They sent you to prison for striking?”

  “No, not for striking,” Louis said. “See, they started running the company pickup truck up and down the road past the strikers, giving us a lot of dust and kicking up gravel. Then when the girl, Helen Mendez, would start calling names over the bullhorn, the pickup truck started playing music—see, the radio was hooked up to a speaker on the roof of the truck—blaring it out so nobody’d be able to hear her yelling their names. I remember, I even remember one of the songs was Falling Leaves, Christ, Roger Williams playing it. And Who Can I Turn To. Helen Mendez’d yell at the truck, ‘Hey, you squares, get XECR Reynosa!’ You want me to light another one?”