Stress

by Loren D. Estleman

  The room was chilly. Battle walked over and closed the window. The old man insisted on sleeping with it open. It was five degrees outside and the heat was always coming on. Their landlord had threatened to raise their rent, either that or make them pay utilities, which was just as bad. A police officer’s pay, together with what Thea made working part-time for a company that provided temporary office help, barely covered their rent and groceries and automobile maintenance. You couldn’t live in Detroit without a car: That was the whole point of the Motor City, for chrissake.

  He found Anthony’s robe in the closet and draped it over the old man’s shoulders, helping him to his feet. “That’s just what you did, Unc; took the game with you. When was the last time you were able to find professional wrestling on any channel, even those ghosty UHF jobs you have to twist the rabbit ears and hang tinfoil all over them to get? I think when Battling Anthony Battle hung up his trunks they just figured what’s the use and said bring on the game shows. You know, like on Bonanza after Hoss died.”

  “Hoss ain’t dead. I seen him just today.”

  “That was a rerun.” All the time he spoke, Battle was gently turning his uncle and guiding him toward the bed. The portable TV on the cart in front of the Strat-O-Lounger was on, with the sound turned down: George McGovern’s beaten-sheep face wearing earphones, probably rebutting whatever Nixon had had to say about Watergate that evening.

  No wonder the old man had decided to withdraw.

  Once he had him in bed, Battle covered him to his chin with the top sheet, nylon thermal blanket, and quilted spread. When he leaned down to kiss his uncle good night, Anthony was already snoring. Battle had always admired that ability to drop off instantly; a requirement of the old wrestling circuit with its long rides in broken-down buses, more often than not conducted directly from one arena to the next with no time to stop at whatever fleatrap hotel the Guild had lined up for its precious natural resources that evening. The trick would have come in handy when Battle was studying for his twelfth-week exams at the academy.

  When he reached out to turn off the TV set, McGovern was gone. In his place was the brutal chiseled face of Quincy Springfield, chairman of the American Ethiopian Congress. On the wall behind him hung the organization’s colors, a conglomeration of someone’s idea of the flag of Ethiopia and the ebony-fist emblem of the Black Power movement. Battle wondered wearily if America would ever move beyond the sixties.

  He flipped off the knob, went out into the living room, and switched on the console set Thea’s parents had given them at their wedding reception, keeping the sound low to avoid disturbing his uncle. The color tubes were unkind to the garish flag and Springfield’s preference for electric-blue suits. The reformed numbers boss’s tailoring had yet to catch up with his raised social conscience.

  “…no longer tip our hats and shuffle aside to give the white man the sidewalk,” he was saying. “We poured the sidewalk. We sweep the sidewalk. Five and one-half years ago, we painted the sidewalk with our blood. We own the sidewalk!”

  Acquiescent grunts, shouts of “Speak the truth, brother!” His listeners were into it now, with all the carefully choreographed responses of the faithful at a church revival. Only the room with its heavily shaded windows and bare ceiling bulbs didn’t resemble a church so much as what it was, a blind pig above a chop joint on Erskine, where a brother or sister who didn’t want to go home when the legitimate bars closed at two in the morning could go for a drink or a lid or a three-digit shot at Long Green Street scribbled on a square of flash paper. In Detroit, politics came mixed with pleasures of a more agreeable sort.

  Springfield continued. “Black voters outnumber white voters in this city four to one. We pay sixty percent of the taxes and provide eighty percent of the labor force. The only two places where we are a minority in Detroit is in the government and the police department. Oh, and we got the jails covered too. Lots of representation in the Wayne County Jail and DeHoCo.”

  Hoots and laughter. Battle grinned. You had to hand it to the guy. Mayor Gribbs couldn’t pry a smile out of his electorate if he dropped his pants and sprayed seltzer.

  But the speaker wasn’t smiling. “I don’t have no statistics from the morgue, on account of dead folks don’t answer the census. Take my word for it, though, we ain’t no minority there neither.” His voice rose. “And I don’t need no numbers in a column to tell me we got one more vote there than we should. Junius Harrison’s stretched out in a refrigerator tray with three holes in his back, and all because he crashed the white man’s party New Year’s Eve.”

  The tape stopped there, and newsman Jac LeGoff’s long weary countenance filled the space. Behind him on the blue background appeared a clean-cut-looking head shot of Harrison, a relaxed, smiling picture that Battle hadn’t seen, while LeGoff read Police Chief John Nichols’s statement that the shooting was under investigation and the department wouldn’t comment pending the outcome.

  Heating up, thought Battle as he turned off the set. When the media stopped using police mug shots, it meant their sympathy was swinging the dead man’s way. But then they had been cranking up the burners under STRESS almost since its inception. In the locker room at 1300, he himself had heard the unit referred to as SANESS: Shoot A Nigger, Eliminate Stinking Shines. The Harrison thing showed signs of becoming just the glue required to bond the Springfields and the LeGoffs and the Coleman Youngs against the administration in an election year. Battle had no great love for either Roman Gribbs or John Nichols, but he had seen enough of revolution even in his young life to know that a lot of babies wound up floating in discarded bath water.

  One day on the shooting team and he already felt wet.

  “Everything okay?” asked Thea when he slid into bed beside her.

  “Just my ass on the line. Nothing new.”

  “What?”

  He realized she was asking about Anthony. “He’s asleep. He just got confused. Thought he was late for a match.”

  “He’s getting worse.”

  “He just woke up foggy. We all do that.”

  “I think we ought to start thinking about a place for him.”

  “No.”

  When she propped herself up on one elbow, the sheet fell away from her left nipple. It was chocolate brown in contrast to her dusty-beige skin. Before they were married he used to call her his personal Hershey’s kiss. It had embarrassed her, even though his listeners didn’t know what he was talking about, and he had stopped. “Charlie, you work. I work. He’s here alone all day. What if he wanders away and gets hurt?”

  “Fat chance of that. Fifty-eight and he can still bench press a Chevy.”

  “Even worse. He might hurt someone else. He was in a violent line of work.”

  “No more violent than the ballet. When I was just a kid he showed me how he could Atomic-Drop the Beast of Borodino, set him down on the canvas as gentle as an egg and make it look to the suckers like he busted every bone in his body. He was the best there was.”

  “Was.”

  He pretended she hadn’t spoken. “Last year when I was pulling double shifts I sat on the edge of the bed one morning with one sock on for ten minutes, trying to figure out if I was getting dressed to go to work or getting undressed to go to bed. You going to put me in a home?”

  “It’s not the same thing. Charlie, I know it’s hard. You’re like father and son.”

  “Not like.” He scrunched himself into a sitting position and wedged his pillow behind his back. The moonlight in the room glowed like hoarfrost and he could see their reflections in the glass of his framed group cadet photo on the wall opposite the bed. He’d attended the funerals of two whose faces shared the frame, dress blues and a rifle salute; if anything was getting worse, if anything had a violent past, present, and future, it was Detroit. The whole city belonged in a home. “I was a year old when my old man went to Jackson for life. Anthony could’ve let me go to a state house, but he took me to his apartment the day the cops came and I never le
ft till I signed up downtown. I don’t give a shit what it says on my birth certificate, The’. He’s my father. I’m not about to do to him what he wouldn’t do to me.”

  “What about you and me? We want to start a family, but we can’t if every time we try to do something about it he interrupts us.”

  He craned his neck suddenly, cocking one ear in the direction of his uncle’s room. She stopped talking and listened with him.

  “What? Do you hear something?”

  “Snoring.” He slid down and hooked a bare leg over her hip. “He ain’t interrupting nobody just now.”

  “I hate it when you talk like that,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like Anthony. He can’t help it. He dropped out in the ninth grade to go to work when his father was killed on the picket line. You graduated in the top third of your class and had twelve weeks’ police training to boot. We’re never going to get anywhere as a people as long as we insist on sounding like Uncle Remus.”

  “Yes’m.”

  “Charlie, I’m serious.”

  “So am I.” He ran a palm up the inside of her thigh. When she opened her mouth to say something, he closed his over it. She whimpered a little and turned into him.

  On the other side of the living room, Battling Anthony Battle awoke to the noise of a headboard thumping against a wall.

  Fucking Larry Shane, he thought. When he ain’t got nobody to kick he jumps all over the fucking canvas like a fucking rabbit. He wondered what that little shit Charlie had done with his lucky trunks.

  Chapter Ten

  KUBICEK WORE HIS BLUE SUIT TO THE DETROIT CLUB. He had wanted to wear his heavy-duty gray, mostly because it was tolerant of his physical short comings and provided protection against the Michigan winter, allowing him to leave his topcoat at home; but his wife had insisted upon the more businesslike serge. Snug across the chest and too light for the razor winds of January, it was stiff with the newness of clothing that was worn only when absolutely necessary. The inspector’s tag was intact in the right saddle pocket of the coat, and a sheaf of old funeral programs occupied the left inside breast pocket. One bore the name of his Aunt Milka, gone to compost these seventeen years. In that time he’d worn out three cars and the chest of drawers she’d left him. But not that fucking suit. If Audrey buried him in it he swore he’d haunt her until the insurance ran out.

  He was in uniform the only time he’d been inside the Romanesque brownstone at Cass and Fort, when a waiter went apeshit over a mixed-up order and stabbed an assistant chef with a grapefruit knife. The chef had recovered, the waiter did two hundred hours of community service for assault with intent to commit great bodily harm other than murder, and the incident never made the press. Eleven mayors and two governors had been elected from inside the club’s walnut-paneled walls. Kubicek supposed the waiter forfeited references.

  He traded his topcoat for a green plastic check and followed a bald geezer in a red jacket past the moosehead into the dining room. This was a square candy box, wood-walled and carpeted and hung with burgundy velour, as quiet as a fart at a formal wedding. Utensils clicked, crystal pinged, conversations conducted in normal voices drifted toward the high ceiling and dissipated like tobacco smoke. The wing collars were gone, also the ruby stickpins and tall hats worn indoors, but aside from that nothing had changed from pictures of the place he had seen in a calendar of Old Detroit on the wall of an inspector’s office at 1300. The same basic faces had gone on slurping soup while outside the brown stink of horseshit gave way to the blue-gray stench of auto exhaust and five wars came and went. The must in the air reminded him of the Collector’s Corner at the Historical Museum, a building he’d visited twice, both times to have his picture taken as Policeman of the Month.

  Nothing about which was conducive to his appetite. When it came to eating, he’d take the heat and the noise and warm, still-quivering meat at the Butcher’s Inn over this place any day. But he wasn’t here for the eating.

  Two men in business suits rose from a corner table as the geezer approached, towing Kubicek. As they did so, several faces turned the sergeant’s way, clearly wondering what this man in ill-fitting serge had to talk about with the mayor and police commissioner of the City of Detroit. Roman Gribbs, shorter and thicker than he appeared on television, took his hand in an iron politician’s grip and uncovered bonded teeth in the same professional smile he had displayed while presenting him with his framed certificate at the museum. That had been three years ago, when his administration was new. The mayor had aged considerably in the time between, sparky council meetings and hot TV lights and the spiraling homicide rate having slackened the pugnacious jowls and carved deep lines in the executive forehead and whitened the distinguished gray at his temples. The practiced twinkle in his eyes had frozen into the kind of desperate glint the sergeant had seen in the eyes of fugitives crouched in the dark corners of freight cars down by the river, their owners torn between making a stand and running for it. And he thought, Shit, and all I’m worried about is my pension.

  Everything about John Nichols was steel gray: suit, tie, wiry hair bent into a pompadour and clipped close above the ears, metal-rimmed glasses tinted gray. Like Gribbs, who had stepped into the shoes of a broken man when Jerome Cavanagh left office two years after the riots, Nichols had inherited his authority from a punch-drunk predecessor: Ray Girardin, longtime News police reporter and believer in the basic decency of his city, stunned into paralysis by the events on Twelfth Street in July 1967. First as a district inspector and later as deputy superintendent, Nichols had stressed the importance of a strong police presence in times of civil disturbance, only to see his precepts ignored when they were most needed. Of all the high-placed officials involved in that affair, beginning with Girardin and ending with Lyndon Johnson, he alone had come out with his reputation enhanced. He was Gribbs’s only choice for top cop, and it was a foregone conclusion that when November came around he would be running for mayor. Certainly there was something of the office-seeker in the way he shook Kubicek’s hand, squeezing just before he let it go. In the past, on podiums and in the receiving lines of police pageantry, he had seemed to want to get rid of it as soon as possible. Or maybe that was too much to try to get out of a simple pressing of flesh. Since New Year’s Eve the sergeant had found himself turning over every gesture and studying it from both sides to learn whether the department was going to stand with him or throw him to the ravening pack.

  “Have you dined here before, Sergeant?” Gribbs asked when the three were seated.

  “Yeah—yes. Kind of. A Big Mac in a TMU out front when I was waiting for back-up.”

  “TMU?”

  “Tactical Mobile Unit,” said Nichols.

  “Oh. Of course. You forget codes and jargon when you talk to the press all the time. They appeal to the fifth-grade mind. Well, you’re in for a pleasant experience. I particularly recommend the abalone.”

  “I don’t know what that is, sir.”

  “It’s a Pacific shellfish. They pry it open and butterfly it and just generally pound hell out of it until it’s tender enough to chew.” He grinned self-consciously, and Kubicek understood the profanity tasted unnatural in the mayoral mouth. Gribbs was making an effort to acclimate himself to his company. “I think you’d like it. They serve it in a delicate horseradish sauce.”

  A waiter assembled himself suddenly out of the molecules at the sergeant’s elbow and handed him a menu bound in burgundy leather. He was nearly as old as the ancient who had escorted Kubicek into the room. Kubicek wondered if there was anyone to take their place when they finish eddying out, or if the club would perish with them. But then there wasn’t a dark or a blond hair in the place and maybe nobody under fifty would even notice.

  By nature and environment he was a red meat man. There was a Black Angus New York Strip that called to him from among the half-dozen items printed on the menu; but the mayor had mentioned the abalone and that was what he requested. At least there we
re no prices included to embarrass him. Nichols, to whom nothing had been recommended, ordered the Strip. Gribbs wrote the dishes on a sheet provided by the waiter—something new to the sergeant, who had always stated his preferences orally even when dining at the toney London Chop House for his twentieth anniversary—and added merely a bowl of mushroom soup for himself, explaining that he anticipated a heavy bill of fare at a fundraiser in Greektown that evening. Kubicek was the only one who had opted for the shellfish.

  While the mayor was present, most of the conversation centered around the Tigers’ last season and what Billy Martin had in mind for them in 1973. Nichols said he didn’t hold out much hope for the club as long as Abner Crownover insisted on running it as if it were his own electric train. At the mention of Crownover’s name his voice faltered, and he hurried up and finished the sentence. After a short awkward silence, Gribbs touched his lips with his linen napkin, pushed away his soup half finished, announcing that he was hosting the Commission on Community Relations in his office in ten minutes. He uncased his politician’s teeth and clamped the sergeant’s hand a second time. “How’s the abalone?”

  “You were right, your honor. They sure pounded the living shit out of it.”

  The smile turned stiff, as if held too long for a tardy shutter button, and Kubicek was sure he’d committed a social blunder. But the mayor gave his upper arm a pat, shook hands with Nichols, and strode out of the room, pausing briefly at a table to exchange beaming words with News columnist Doc Greene. Remembering the easy Irish charm with which Gribbs’s predecessor, Jerry Cavanagh, handled the press—at least until the riots came along—Kubicek thought this mayor looked stilted and mechanical. Somehow it reminded him of the differences between the combat veterans of his own generation and those who had served in Vietnam; far from the conquering hero, Gribbs appeared to be interested chiefly in keeping his head down and getting out of office with his ass in one piece.

  Nichols appeared to share the sergeant’s thoughts. “Poor dumb son of a bitch. I thought when I talked him into withholding the homicide stats he’d take the hint. Don’t even give those newspaper bastards the time of day. I’ll never forgive them for what they did to Ray Girardin. As a cop he was piss-poor, but he was one of their own for thirty years and they turned on him. They’re worse than fucking lawyers.”