Stress

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Mr. Springfield is here at my invitation,” she said. “I’ve asked him to speak at the memorial service for Junius and he’s accepted.”

  “I hadn’t heard a service was planned.”

  Springfield said, “You weren’t meant to. The police aren’t invited.”

  “My boy was cut up by the coroner. His brain was taken out and weighed and put back. Three funeral directors told me they could cover the stitches so no one would know they were there. But I would. I had the body cremated as soon as it was released to me. The urn will be present at the service.” Her face was tight. The hands in her lap were balled into fists, and Battle had the impression she was holding herself together from inside with invisible cords wrapped around them.

  “I’d like to ask you about your son’s juvenile record.”

  “Now, how do you suppose I knowed that’s the first thing you’d ask about?” Springfield said.

  “The question was for Mrs. Randolph.” He waited.

  “He was nineteen, attending classes at Wayne State,” she said. “A policeman stopped him on Washington—failure to yield—and searched him. The prosecutor said he was carrying too much marijuana for his own use. He went to Jackson for three years and served every day.”

  “Busted for selling grass. There’s a profile of your hardline criminal.”

  Battle said, “Jackson’s been known to turn out a few. What was your son like when he came out?”

  Her lips formed words that found no voice. “Changed,” she said finally. She looked down at her hands.

  “Was he bitter?”

  “Now, why should he be?” Springfield said. “He only done more time than Billy the Kid for passing out reefers to his classmates. I imagine he was happy they didn’t give him the chair.”

  “You’ll get your chance to talk at the service, Springfield. Right now I’m talking with Mrs. Randolph.”

  “Not bitter. Just—changed. You’d have to have known him before he went to prison and after he came out to understand what I mean. He used to sing around the house all the time—Lord, but that boy would sing! His father had this old seventy-eight of Tennessee Ernie Ford singing ‘Sixteen Tons.’ Junius asked us to play it over and over when he was little. You never knew when he’d bust out with that song.”

  Battle smiled. “Did he have a good voice?”

  “Lord, no! Owen—that was Junius’s father—he always said that boy couldn’t string two notes together if he drilled holes in them. In high school, when everyone was starting bands, he taught himself to play the guitar, put a down payment on an electric one with what he made cutting grass, and got some boys together in the garage. It being our garage, he made himself lead singer. Well, they rehearsed a few times, and then one Saturday nobody showed up. Junius went out to find out why. He never said what they told him, but he returned that guitar to the store two days later. Owen went back to parking the car in the garage Saturdays.” She blinked. “I guess you think that was the end of his recording career.”

  “It doesn’t sound like the Stevie Wonder Story,” Battle said.

  “Wait.” She got up and went through an open doorway into a hall lined with pictures.

  After an awkward moment Battle broke the silence between him and Springfield. “I caught you on the news the other day.”

  “Which channel?”

  “Seven.”

  “They cut out some of my best stuff. Channel Two ran the whole thing.”

  “Guess they got tired of Nixon.”

  “Everybody’s tired of Nixon.”

  Battle glanced down the hall, then turned his head to look at the staircase to the second story of the duplex. When he turned back, Springfield was watching him.

  “Don’t waste your time looking for Randolph,” the activist said. “Land mine blowed his legs off in some ratshit place called Phu Loc in sixty-eight. He died in a tent hospital while the medics was busy wrapping up some white colonel’s gouty big toe.”

  “Was that before or after Junius got busted?”

  “Before.” He moved a shoulder. “Yeah, I asked. I conducted my own investigation. Couldn’t afford to have Junius Harrison blow up in my face. You got to pick your symbols carefully.”

  “So you admit you’re using him.”

  “How long you been black? We been getting used ever since we put down our spears and picked up a hoe. Difference here is I’m using one of us to make things better for the rest of us, not to make sure the cotton gets to market and Miz Scarlett gets her new buggy.”

  “ ‘Consider the end.’ That it?”

  “Brother, there ain’t no end.”

  “Randolph’s pension pays for all this?”

  “Just part. Mrs. Randolph fronts for MichCon with a clipboard, going from door to door asking don’t they want to ditch that ugly oil tank in the back yard and hook up to the line. Junius picked up the rest with his pay from the law office. Guess she’ll have to move soon. I bet Sergeant Kubicek has his own place.”

  “You’re right. Let’s hang the son of a bitch.”

  Springfield didn’t smile.

  Mrs. Randolph returned carrying an eight-by-ten manila envelope. She flipped up the lid of a large console stereo, another item of rustic veneer over particle board, and transferred a flat black plastic disk with a big hole in the center from the envelope to the turntable. After a moment a light baritone issued from the fabric-covered speakers, wavering on the low notes and cracking on the high notes of “Mama Didn’t Lie.” It appeared James Brown had nothing to worry about from the Detroit quarter.

  Mrs. Randolph remained standing next to the machine until the song ended, then wiped both eyes with the heels of her hands and lifted the 45-rpm record from the fat spindle. She walked over to the rocker and showed it to Battle. The typewritten legend on the yellow label read:

  JUNIUS HARRISON TO MARIAN HARRISON RANDOLPH HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY 1972

  “Boy loved his mama,” Springfield said. “There’s your profile of a big-time stick-up artist.”

  Battle looked up into the woman’s face. “Mrs. Randolph, would you mind telling me where you got those facial scars?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  THERE WERE NO PURE RACES.

  Wolf, whose real name was Andrew Porterman, was three quarters Ottawa on his mother’s side and God only knew what on his father’s, although he suspected German-Irish. The chromosomal lottery had determined that the Indian side take precedence in his features and coloring, and so after eighteen years of cursing that particular piece of luck he had chosen to embrace his maternal heritage, growing his hair to his shoulders and attending classes in his native language and ceremonial dances at St. Ignace, twelve miles from his birthplace in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He was thoroughly steeped in the tribal way of life by the time he hitchhiked to San Francisco in the fall of 1969 and boarded one of three boats that November for the unlawful occupation of Alcatraz by militant members of the American Indian Movement.

  He never was clear on just why the island was chosen, other than that it had been left derelict ever since the prison closed down in 1963 and no one was there to stop them. Certainly neither the pile of rock anchored like a petrified turd in the busy harbor nor the decaying structure that stood upon it held any cultural or historical significance to native Americans, whose ancestors had been the first to abandon the archipelago as soon as it became apparent it would support neither crops nor game. A far better choice—and a more convenient one to Wolf—would have been Mackinac Island, site of the capture of Fort Michillimackinac and the most conspicuous victory in Chief Pontiac’s seven-tribe conspiracy to drive the British from the Northwest Territory in 1763. But November was a bleak and bitter month on Lake Huron, and unlike the warriors who followed the great Ottawa leader, the braves of the late twentieth century preferred to dance around their campfires off the coast of California.

  Wolf, who had settled upon his lupine name somewhere on the road between Peoria and Des Moines, had enjoyed himself
tremendously during the first days of the occupation. He had always found the Indians of northern Michigan a dour lot, many of them alcoholics who found no pleasure in drinking, only obliteration, professional fishermen who denigrated the white man’s wasteful ways while emptying the lakes of fish with the great gill nets that they alone were allowed to use because of the old treaties; miserable creatures mostly, ashamed of their ancestry, taking out their black moods on their women and dying with enlarged livers before age forty. By contrast, the Bay Area tribes were fierce, proud, and fun-loving. Their moccasins sprouted wings as they whirled around campfires of brush and driftwood. They shared Black Jack and Thunderbird bottles and peyote buttons, and under the mellow influence of these substances they told the ancient stories handed down by their great-great-grandfathers of old wars and dead gods and hunting the buffalo. Wolf, who from his researches knew that Utopian society to be as straightlaced as any Victorian village, was gratified to learn that the flower children of San Francisco had had their influence, and spent one particularly memorable night in Al Capone’s cell with three women ranging in age from seventeen to thirty-two.

  But the Brave New World could not sustain itself. During the second week, old tribal enmities erupted into fistfights, a gang of button-heads vandalized the office of the warden for no other reason than that the defunct post represented authority, smashing windows, ripping out light fixtures, and shitting on the floor, and Wolf acquired a severe case of crabs. When he caught a Seneca picking his pocket for cash to score a lid off a Cheyenne with connections to Jimmy Lanza, he felt he’d had his share of the native life. The morning fog rolled in and he shipped out aboard a stolen launch. As soon as his feet hit pavement his thumb went out for any transportation pointed east.

  He didn’t go all the way back home. The Upper Peninsula was as rocky as Alcatraz and just as incapable of supporting life, or what he thought of as life. The copper and iron deposits and virgin pines that had fueled the mining and lumber industries of the last century were gone. Tourism shut down during the seven long months of winter, and was never all that good in summer in a place that was largely unknown outside Michigan. Fishing was backbreaking work and he loathed the stench. Detroit, coming off the ropes at last from the one-two punch of the Edsel disaster and the massive effort to re-gear to meet the safety consciousness of the late sixties, was hiring, and Wolf went to work assembling the great lumbering barge that the T-bird had become at the Ford plant in Rawsonville.

  A wildcat strike ended that. The cost of living, goosed up by phases one through three of Nixon’s surefire plan to end inflation, soared to Pluto while wages stalled on the launching pad. The United Auto Workers brass post-Walter Reuther, grown fat on their seats on the boards of the Big Three, declined to authorize a strike, and so Wolf and a couple of hundred of his fellow employees hit the bricks on their own. Scab labor stepped in, the cars kept on getting made. Wolf and another striker procured awls and divided the employee parking lot between them, singling out tires on cars belonging to temporary workers. The other striker was nowhere around when the sheriffs deputies came in. Wolf drew 180 days in the Washtenaw County Jail for malicious destruction of property.

  There he became friendly with Dexter Flood, who was coasting through his last month on a ninety for exposing himself to a policewoman masquerading as a school bus driver. Flood confessed that he had plummeted from his pinnacle as an armorer with the Black Panthers when he fried his brains on a combination of acid and Preparation H, self-administered anally, and attempted to hold up the downtown office of the National Bank of Detroit with a staple gun. He did three years in Jackson for that, at the end of which he wasn’t good for much beyond running the occasional errand for the Panthers, an organization disintegrating just as rapidly after taking heavy hits from FBI commandos in face shields and flak jackets. In the lunchroom one day toward the end of his sentence, Dexter asked Wolf if he wanted to meet Wilson McCoy.

  The name was vaguely familiar to the Indian, who associated it with the civil unrest of the time just past. “Isn’t he in prison or something?”

  “No. Hell, no! Oh, they done busted him once, but you don’t pen up a brother like Wilson for long. He’s one of the ten.”

  “Ten what? He part of the Crest test?”

  “No. Shit, no!”—nothing was just no with Dexter—“Most Wanted, that ten! Three months on the feds’ hit parade come September.”

  “Well, how do I meet him if the FBI can’t find him?”

  “Oh, they know where he is. They just too chicken shit to go in after him. Not yours truly, though. I got the bona fides.”

  “I don’t see you using them to get out that door.” The door in question, leading from the lunchroom to the main corridor, stood open, but with a guard the size of Saginaw Harbor standing in front of it.

  “I go through it next week. After that I don’t come back till I pick you up. That’s when I take you to see Wilson.”

  “Why do I want to see Wilson? He got a job for me? What’s it pay?”

  “Nothing. To start.”

  Those were the last words on the subject until the day he found Dexter waiting for him outside the jail door. Wolf didn’t recognize him at first out of coveralls. In their place he wore a black windbreaker and beret to match over a navy turtleneck, unpressed khakis, and black high-top combat boots polished to a mirror finish. He shook Wolf’s hand, escorted him to a green Chevy Nova gone lacy with rust around the wheel wells, and drove nonstop from Ann Arbor to Detroit, talking the whole way.

  “Man, I fell into soft warm shit when I took up with Wilson. That indecent exposure thing was an old rap. That’s what I was down to when he pulled me in and put me to work. See, he can’t leave the neighborhood on account of the feds is waiting for him, so somebody gots to go out and round up shit. You know: eats, clothes, toilet paper. That shit.”

  “Girls?”

  “Sometimes, only not so much now. Now old J. Edgar’s got bitches on the payroll Wilson’s scared he’ll see a badge when he pulls off their panties. So I expect he uses his hand. I don’t spend a whole hell of a lot of time thinking about that part.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “Room and board, for one. Where you staying?”

  “I had a furnished room. I guess I don’t now. I haven’t paid rent in six months.”

  “I gots me a cot off Wilson’s room. Good stereo in there and a color TV and fridge. Pop the top off a Stroh’s, watch Columbo, and groove out to Aretha.”

  “Sounds like a good gig. Why share?”

  “Man needs a day off now and then. I can’t take a bitch to the room—freaks Wilson out on account of what I said before—and I ain’t like him, whacking off’s like chink food, I’m horny again a hour later. Also I miss the blind pigs. Wilson stopped going when he thought one of the brothers tending bar at the Center for Community Action tailed him home one night. I figure you and I could trade off.”

  “If he likes me.”

  “He already likes you.”

  “I must have more charisma than I thought. We haven’t met yet.”

  “I done told him you was injun. Injuns got more reason to hate feds than the brothers, to his way of thinking. You know, losing America, that shit. You’re as good as in.”

  “You said there was room and board in it for one. What’s two?”

  Dexter grinned at the windshield. “Well, hell, the honor! Wilson’s the Man. He Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Johnny Dillinger, and Geronimo all rolled into one. Shit, who wouldn’t jump at the chance to be a chunk of history?”

  At first, Wolf’s brush with history promised to be short. Although, as Dexter explained, an extension cord had been run into the living quarters on the top floor from the next building, the room where Wilson McCoy received them on the floor below was lit only by a Coleman lantern standing on the Formica table behind which the black revolutionary sat. McCoy looked far older than his twenty-two years that summer of 1970, hollow-cheeked, vague-eyed, and—the ne
wcomer suspected—balding beneath his Panthers beret. As the interview went on, McCoy lit reefers off one another from a row of them on the table without offering any to his visitors. When Dexter piped up to answer one of the questions put to the applicant, McCoy barked at him to leave the room. Alone with Wolf, the man behind the table asked him if he was queer.

  “Are you?”

  “That’s none of your fucking business!” McCoy snapped.

  “Same answer.”

  “I got nothing against Indians, but you can’t trust a fag. You know Hoover’s a fag.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Well, he is. He only hires fags because he’s afraid his agents will spill confidential information to their wives.”

  “But a lot of agents are married.”

  “That’s just for looks. You don’t look queer, but jail’s been known to turn a man around.”

  “Not in six months.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  Wolf unzipped his fly and pulled out his cock.

  He still treasured the look on Wilson McCoy’s face, the only time he had seen him look truly surprised. His eyes flicked down, lingered, then back up to Wolf’s face when he realized they were lingering. And the Indian learned then that black people can indeed blush. His mouth worked, he glanced toward the door through which Dexter had left. Wolf really thought the longest-lasting fugitive on the FBI’s Most Wanted list was afraid he was going to be raped.

  The Indian looked down at his limp phallus. “It isn’t very hard, is it? Now tell me, could any self-respecting fag show off his prick to a stud like Wilson McCoy and avoid getting a boner?”

  For the first and last time in their association, McCoy laughed.

  “Put it back,” he said. “You made your point. When can you move in?”

  “Right now. I left some clothes in my old room, but I bet they sold them to a secondhand store by now for back rent.”

  McCoy rolled over on his right hip, pried a thick fold of bills from a back pocket, and flipped it onto the table. “Buy what you need out of that. Your first job’s waiting for you when you get back.”