Lucky Stiff

by Elizabeth Sims

  "I know she took Librium. I remember her saying it by name."

  "Her doctor, her gynecologist, probably—did he prescribe it to her?"

  "Yeah, he must've. I remember her pill bottles."

  "Yeah," I said. "Yeah. How much did she drink?"

  "Where are you going with this, Lillian?"

  "Come on, Duane. Your mom was taken advantage of somehow. I know some cops, you know. I'm friends with some cops, and I'm doing what they'd be doing: asking every question I can think of."

  I waited.

  At length he said, "Well, she did drink during the day a little bit. Sometimes. Not every day, though."

  "Did she drink with your dad at night? Did they used to get drunk together?"

  "I guess…I guess they did. I hauled out empties with the trash most weeks."

  "OK, thanks, Duane. I've got a lot more to find out, so—"

  "She wasn't an alcoholic, though."

  "Oh, for—" I caught myself and said, "No, probably not."

  "She took good care of me."

  "She sure did. She was a good mom."

  "She was the best."

  I hung up and started to dial Uncle Guff's number, then decided I'd talk to him at bowling tomorrow night. I thought about Earl C. Raymer.

  Detroit is the kind of town where people tend to stay put, whether for the sake of familiarity, comfort, or economics. I got out my Detroit white pages. Earl C. Raymer was listed. I made a note of the number and address, and took off again. The address was on a pretty block on the north side of town, Stratford Street. Tall shade trees arched their boughs over the pavement. The house was a half-brick Tudor with peeling trim and a shaggy front yard.

  I rang and stepped back hopefully. An elderly white woman came to the door and allowed me to speak to her through the chain latch.

  "Good afternoon, is this the Raymer residence?"

  She gave me a lovely smile. "Yes, it is!"

  I introduced myself and explained what was on my mind. She let me in and showed me to a seat in the living room.

  Mrs. Raymer was built like my landlady Mrs. McVittie, straight up in one column from the ground. "Can't be too careful these days," she said, latching the door again.

  "You said it."

  "Honey, would you like a glass of milk?"

  "No, but thank you very much."

  She lowered herself into a vinyl recliner. "Earl's not here," she said.

  "Oh."

  The walls were packed solid with framed blowups of photographs by Earl C. Raymer. An enormous shot of the Polish-American mayor Roman Gribbs with his arm around TV anchorman Bill Bonds at a swanky party; a pissed-off-looking Frank Sinatra emerging from the Roma Café; Al Kaline signing baseballs for a bunch of kids in wheelchairs; a burning building, not the Polka Dot, the foreground strewn with rocks and bottles, a looter lugging an armload of clothes past the flames. Twelfth Street, 1969.

  I said, "These are marvelous pictures. Is Mr. Raymer…Did he go out or something?"

  His wife smiled brightly. "I'm really not sure. I think so. Yes!"

  "Does Mr. Raymer have his old negatives, do you think? From his photography?"

  "Oh, yes, he keeps everything!" She laughed. "For years and years now, oh, he's got heaps of stuff."

  "Well, I wonder if I might, uh, do you think I could take a look through the stuff? Is it well-organized?"

  "Oh, it's all in boxes and boxes, everything's marked, he's been doing this for years, you know! Years and years! It's all down there."

  "Down the basement?"

  "Mm-hmm."

  "I know it's asking a lot, but it's very important to me that I try to find film he shot the night my parents died in a fire."

  "Oh, I'm sorry! I'm so sorry to hear that. Oh, my."

  I waited.

  Mrs. Raymer smiled and said, "Honey, would you like a glass of milk?"

  "Ah, no, thank you, Mrs. Raymer."

  She folded her hands and smiled at me so pleasantly.

  I noticed stacks of mail layered on a buffet along the wall. Casually I got up and looked them over. I saw an envelope from a hospice affiliated with Henry Ford Hospital, an envelope from Medicare, and another one from the hospice, among junk mail.

  "Is Mr. Raymer in a hospice?" I asked, turning to her.

  Her chin quivered. "I don't think so. I'm not really sure. No."

  "Do you have children, Mrs. Raymer?"

  Her eyes brightened, then dimmed. "No, definitely not. I don't think so."

  "Mrs. Raymer, I'll be right back, OK?"

  I walked through the kitchen, found the door to the basement, flipped the light switch, and went down to confront the archives of Earl C. Raymer.

  The smell was very musty. Old mold, that constrictive smell. I was surprised to find only a ping-pong table and two metal shelving units filled with canned goods. My sneakers squeaked on the concrete floor. I saw a crap-colored waterline on the cinder-block walls, an ugly boundary about two feet from the floor.

  I returned to Mrs. Raymer, who was watching two robins perched in shrubbery outside the living room window.

  I said, "Mrs. Raymer, was there a flood? Did your basement get flooded?"

  She smiled, glad to see me. "I don't think so. No, no. We never had a flood—so far, anyway. Knock on wood!" She reached out to rap the coffee table.

  "All right, well, thank you very much, Mrs. Raymer. I'm going now."

  She followed me to the door. As I closed it behind me I said, "Lock the door now, Mrs. Raymer. OK?" I heard the chain latch slide into place.

  One of the next-door houses had a car in the driveway. I rang there and spoke with a young Hispanic man holding a baby on his hip. He told me the Raymers' daughter stops by twice a week. "I try to look in on her the other days," he said. "Is she all right?"

  He confirmed that Earl was in the hospice, with terminal cancer.

  "This is a funny question," I said, "but have you all had some basement flooding? From heavy rains, maybe those storms last year?"

  "Yeah, that's when it was," he said. "Six houses on this block had raw sewage come up knee-high."

  "Next door?"

  "Yeah. Earl had to hire a truck to haul away all his stuff that got ruined. I felt awful for him. His photography materials. Tons of stuff—pictures and film and everything. He stood there and cried."

  Chapter 7

  The next day's dawn was a gray one. Drinking my coffee, I stood at the window and watched a soft drizzle fall into the grass of the McVitties' backyard. My windows were open, and I breathed in that gradual freshness such a rain brings. Hardly a breeze stirred it. It was a soothing rain. I smiled and called Uncle Guff.

  From him I learned that Aunt Rosalie's eye doctor had pronounced her cataracts to be somewhat worse. She would probably need surgery in a few years.

  "Oh, that's too bad," I said. "Well, I guess they've got that surgery down to a science these days."

  Uncle Guff agreed. "It's like an assembly line, those places. Easier'n getting a tooth out."

  I heard Aunt Rosalie yell, "Yeah, but it's still my eyes!"

  "So, Uncle Guff, you still want to do early-bird bowling?"

  "Well…" he said in his tone of equivocation, which was as if he were about to sing.

  I prompted, "If this weather keeps up…"

  "Yeah," he said. "Yeah."

  "We could go fishing instead."

  "Maybe we better."

  "I think we better."

  Uncle Guff loved to fish in the rain. Not rain rain, not a lashing downpour, but drizzle, soft lukewarm summer drizzle just like this. It was his belief that the fish bit better in such weather, although neither of us had ever conducted a controlled study on it. It didn't matter to me; I liked to fish, and I liked to fish in the company of Uncle Guff. The good part was, Aunt Rosalie would never come along in the rain. She warned that we'd be killed by lightning. For years I'd argued with her, pointing out the difference between a thunderstorm—a real storm that produced lightni
ng—and gentle, long-term, soaking, nourishing drizzle, to no avail. Finally I took a cue from my uncle, who merely ignored her and took off in his hat and slicker. It wasn't that he didn't want her to come; he enjoyed his wife, he just didn't want to spend that much energy combating her notions.

  Besides, we played it safe: only shore fishing in the rain. Uncle Guff had a sixteen-foot Grumman open boat with a twenty-five-horse Johnson outboard on it, and we went all over the river in it. But we never took it out in the rain.

  I picked him up in the Caprice and we swung over to Pap's Bait & Tackle for worms, potato chips, and Cokes. Then we went over to the old chemical works, a sprawling abandoned factory in one of the great riverside brownfields. I parked next to the rotting guard shack and we carried our stuff—tackle boxes, poles, folding stools, buckets, food bag—through a gap in the fence. Nobody was around, nobody cared.

  The factory had a burly freighter dock that jutted fifty feet out into the river. It was the best fishing pier around, and we had it all to ourselves.

  We got ourselves set up in a few minutes. Our standard bait-casting rigs comprised a sinker and a long leader with two short leaders coming off of it horizontally, on swivels. The hooks, when the rig was settled in the river, were positioned one and two feet off the bottom. This rig worked great for us.

  I pinched a fat nightcrawler in two and threaded the halves onto my hooks. Uncle Guff lowered a bucket on a rope the twelve feet or so to the water, let it fill, and hauled it up. This was our hand-washing water. Setting my rig down, I rinsed the worm guts from my fingers. Then I rared back with my pole and cast out my rig. It whistled out and splashed in. I gave the sinker time to touch bottom, then reeled up the slack. We used Japanese rods and reels from Kmart and five-pound-test monofilament.

  The corroding walls of the factory loomed behind us. This setting was not a bucolic one. Belle Isle, for instance, was bucolic. Bishop Park in Wyandotte was a bucolic place to fish from. Sometimes we fished those places. But there was something about the chemical works dock that gave us special pleasure. Maybe there was a bit of perverseness in us, or maybe it was the feeling we got moving around on the thick weathered planks. The worn wood, the creosote, the gargantuan pilings beneath us: the architecture of industry now serving a sporting purpose.

  Our view swept from the fuzzy green line of the Canadian waterfront to the other factories, mills, docks, and marinas up and down both shorelines. The big boats and the little boats of the Great Lakes, they all had to pass through the Detroit River, which is essentially a strait between lakes Erie and St. Clair. It's a mighty, wide waterway. All of Henry Ford's iron ore floated on the Detroit River. All the latex from those rubber plantations. All the coal for the furnaces of Detroit. The drizzle dissolving into the surface of the water created an even, delicate carpet. Our lines disappeared in a blur. I thought about the fish swimming below and licked my lips at the prospect of a fried perch or walleye dinner. An American freighter from Duluth slipped slowly past us, going downstream. There were no small boats out today.

  Uncle Guff resembled my father but not uncannily so. Their physiques were wiry and agile, but my father's face was rounder, Uncle Guff's squarer, especially in the mouth and jaw. Their noses were the same—slightly beaked, narrowing at the tip, like their father's, whose likeness I had studied often in an ancestral album. Although Uncle Guff hadn't been a serviceman in wartime (punctured eardrum from childhood), and although his demeanor was quiet, I thought he was the fiercer of the two. It was the eyes, his blue eyes there behind the lenses of his bifocals. Someone who knew him less well might describe his gaze as hard. But that wasn't it. Uncle Guff was not pitiless; his temper was long. He was, perhaps, more willing to see the world for what it was. My father, in creating the Polka Dot, built a place where people could pretend that the world was more comfortable than it was. My father had served in a war, but aside from the torpedo attack, he hadn't seen combat. Uncle Guff worked in a steel mill all his life, among fire and heat and dirt and danger, among brutish machines and tough workers. He turned crumbly elements into hard, useful stuff.

  The older I get, the more I understand that if you're going to view the world honestly, you must adopt a measure of fierceness.

  I handed him a can of Coke and opened one for myself. I was wearing my commando-green poncho and my Vietnam hat, shorts, and my Chuck Taylor basketball sneakers. My sneakers would get wet through, but it didn't matter. Uncle Guff sighed and settled his thighs onto his camp stool. Water dripped from his broad-brimmed oilcloth hat onto his yellow slicker.

  "Boy, I wonder how many times we've gone fishing together."

  "Hmm," he said.

  "Hundreds, I guess."

  "Yep."

  "'Member when you used to tell me what was in the ships? That one's full of coal. That one's full of postholes. 'Member?"

  "Yep."

  If you knew what to look for, you really could tell what the ships were carrying. Low in the water with heaps on deck, it was coal. Low in the water with no heaps, iron ore. High in the water, empty. Postholes.

  I sipped my Coke and set it on a plank. "Um, Uncle Guff…"

  He wasn't the type to say a prompting 'Yeah?' He just waited, his forefinger curled beneath his line just ahead of his reel.

  I began again, "So, you know, I was sort of asking you about Dad and Mom? I was thinking about the old days. And I was wondering, you know, about the…the aftermath of everything. Well, I guess, first of all—did Mom and Daddy have life insurance?"

  "They did," answered my uncle. "They had Mutual of Omaha."

  Instantly my mind's eye beheld the shield of the Mutual of Omaha company, my mind's ear heard Marlin Perkins's voice announcing, "Mutual of Omaha presents…Wild Kingdom!" Maybe you remember that program. It was a marvelous show, with senior naturalist Marlin Perkins and his hunky sidekick Jim Fowler venturing into the darkest jungles, the hottest deserts, the remotest islands, to discover and show us American kids the secrets of nature. Who could ever forget Jim's wrestling match with an anaconda? Or the way Marlin's voice would crack with tension as he described an encounter with a cranky beast on some isolated veldt?

  "OK," I said, turning off my TV memory machine, "and that money would have paid for their funerals, and my upbringing, right?"

  Pause. "Some, it did."

  "Of course, you and Aunt Rosalie covered the rest."

  He said nothing.

  I asked, "Was there an insurance policy on the bar itself? The business and the building?"

  Another pause, a long one. "Yeah."

  "Did Daddy and Mom own the building, then?"

  "Well, there was a mortgage on it."

  "Oh. Like, did they have a lot of equity in it by that time? A significant amount?"

  The tip of my rod quivered, and I felt the nervous, darting nibble of a fish. I waited as the nibbling grew stronger, tuggier, then set the hook—or hooks, as the case might be—with a firm jerk. I cranked my reel. I brought up one yellow perch on my upper hook, keeper-size for that sweet species of panfish, about nine inches long. I grasped it, flattening the spines of its dorsal fin safely against my palm, and peered into its white mouth. I freed the hook and dropped the fish into the second bucket Uncle Guff had half filled with the cold river water. It swam around and around, its golden-green sides slipping along the bucket's wall. The bait on my other hook had been robbed off, possibly by the same fish.

  I baited my hooks again, rinsed my hands, and cast out my rig. Just as I did so, Uncle Guff got a strike and pulled up two perch, one a keeper. The too-small one he removed from the hook with wet hands and threw back. The healthy, mulchy smell of the river saturated the air all around us.

  After he'd rebaited and cast, he said, "The insurance didn't amount to much."

  "How much was it for?"

  "You know, Lillian, it was so long ago I don't remember."

  "Hmm."

  "There was no significance to it."

  "Uncle Guff, I want to tell you
about something. Remember I told you I bumped into this guy, Duane Sechrist? Who used to live in our neighborhood, and his dad knew Daddy, and saved his life in Korea?"

  My uncle sighed.

  I went on, "I know this is all in the past. It's a long time ago. It's finished. But can you understand that sometimes people need to—well, dig back? Especially if questions come up, things they didn't used to know about?"

  He just waited silently, his eyes on the tip of his rod.

  I told him Duane's story. I told him about Trix and how it seemed she turned up as Duane's new mom. "She was this barmaid. You've got to remember Trix. Supposedly she died, all burned up, they found her wedding band—do you remember all this? And then, I swear, Uncle Guff, she turned up in Florida as Bill Sechrist's new wife."

  "Eh?" he said, the first reaction I'd gotten from him.

  "Yeah, so I think there was foul play," I talked on, pouring out my suspicions and fears.

  I told him about the Sechrists' Dodge with its Lyndon Johnson rust. I told him about the Detroit News archives, and Earl C. Raymer.

  "…And I know you said the fire department thought the fryer caught fire by accident," I said. "I'm not saying it didn't. But I called over there and a clerk said she'd look for that arson report. I'm going to call back tomorrow. I just want to look all this stuff over, if only to settle my mind that it really happened the way…the way I always thought it did."

  I got another fish on, this one a nasty ugly sheephead, which I threw back.

  I went on, "And you and Aunt Rosalie are my only, my last links to the past. You know? Did you meet the barmaid's husband, this Robert Hawley? Did you and Aunt Rosalie go to her funeral? I saw in the papers that it was a day after Daddy and Mom's. It seems to me the Sechrists would have gone to Daddy and Mom's funerals. Or come to the funeral home, anyway. I don't remember seeing them, though." I had not been taken to Trix Hawley's funeral. "I was wondering what Trix's husband might've been like."

  Uncle Guff pulled up two walleye, which are good eating. This day was turning into rather lovely fishing. The drizzle kept up, easing just a bit as the afternoon commenced. I watched my uncle as closely as I dared. Other than the "Eh?" when I told him about Trix turning up in Florida, he hadn't reacted to anything I said. He was really a tin soldier when I suggested that foul play had been involved in the death of his brother.