A $500 House in Detroit

by Drew Philp

  “We have ruins, too.”

  “You do not have any ruins. In Rome you can just drive right up to them. To take a tour.”

  “We do, too. The train station’s like a ruin. The Packard plant is like a ruin.” The Michigan Central Station, abandoned since 1988 and eighteen stories high, was the most stately abandoned building in the city.

  “But yours are not very old, only like fifty years. Ours are thousands of years old, they are ancient. You are jealous.”

  “I’m not jealous. Ours will be like that someday.”

  “But it is not the same. Tell me you are jealous.”

  She held my arm and stared at me from under her delicate brow. I could see the pink of her tongue tucked between her lips.

  “We should go swimming,” I suggested.

  “You are jealous. I can see.”

  I stood to remove my clothing and smiled at her. She was almost a decade older than me. The danger of falling in love wasn’t the age difference, it was the ocean between us.

  We had been by the lake all afternoon, in a cove by the point of the island. Andy Kemp had shown me the spot. Every year when someone on Forestdale had a birthday, they would load scraps of broken tile, mortar, and grout into cars or cargo bikes and the birthday person would tile their age into the stones flirting with the water, the cool lake licking at their feet and the underside of the boulders. There were dozens down there, twelve-, fifteen-, thirty-year markers, varicolored and beautiful. We sat atop them.

  “I’m going swimming. You can come with me or not.”

  “But what about the bobbles?” She looked at the water with her hands between her knees.

  I sat again, covering myself, next to her. “The bubbles? Again? I’ve never, ever heard a thing about the damn bubbles. This water’s clean.”

  “But what if we sink?”

  “I was a lifeguard when I was in high school. I’ll save you if you’re drowning,” I said. “It was a great job. I sat by the pool all day, memorized poems, bronzed.”

  “Bronzed?”

  “Got tan in the sun.”

  “That is what my friends want to hear back home, the slang. I’ve got some shit,” she said, testing the word in her mouth. It came out sounding more like “sheeet.”

  “You have to shit?”

  “NOO!” She hit me and laughed. “My housemate asked if I wanted to smoke weed. Weed?”

  I nodded.

  “I said I didn’t have any. He said, ‘I’ve got some shit.’ I’ve never heard of calling marijuana ‘shit.’ Yesterday he told me, ‘I could use a drink.’ ” She laughed her husky laugh and gently touched me again.

  “What’s so funny about that?”

  “I could use a drink. I’ve never heard like this before, I could use a drink. It is funny.”

  I shrugged. “I guess it’s the language.”

  “How can you use a drink?” She stood up. “We will swim.”

  We stripped to our underclothes. She had on a gray camisole and underwear that made me wonder if she’d thought about me when putting it on that morning. I had packed my bathing suit in my backpack, but didn’t feel right putting it on when she hadn’t brought anything but what she was wearing. We waded in, but the water was tepid. She walked farther than I, over the smooth lake stones while I watched.

  “It’s getting kind of cold,” I said.

  “If we don’t go now we will lose our chance.”

  She looked back at me from the waist-high water. All at once she dived in. It took her longer to surface than I had expected and for a moment I stood there worried. She came up thirty yards from shore, and all I saw was her head sticking above the water like a dog swims, hair flattened and glistening. I was impressed at how long she could swim underwater, especially water she suspected would damage her body. It was a bold move, one a girl makes. I wondered what she thought about during those few moments submerged, pressing against the chilly water with her hands and thighs.

  I almost lost my shorts diving in after. I surfaced next to her, our bare legs entangled, treading in place. The water was cool and weightless, swift, bending around the point of the island. We were close enough to touch and I wanted to take hold of her there, warmth against the chill, but the water wasn’t buoyant enough to hold us both.

  “Do you like it?” I asked.

  “I like it,” she said.

  “Are you jealous?”

  “No!” she said, splashing me as she drifted off, floating on her back. I followed.

  We floated with the current, happy to feel the water between our barely touching fingertips and bobbing waves. The lake was remarkably clean, fresh from Lake Huron by way of the St. Clair River. It’s quieter than on the shore somehow, and even the crashing of the waves is diminished when you’re in the water, as if the lake has pulled you aside to whisper a secret that needs silence to be true. We honored it, and only Cecilia’s giggles broke the glacial pact. The current pulled us downstream, and we swam back to shore, walking again over the tiled birthdays.

  “Can we sit in the grass and dry out?” she said as we climbed the bank.

  I followed her up the slope, across the dirt path to where she lay arms outstretched in the tall grass in the sun. She had found a small purple flower, chicory, and felt it between her fingers without plucking it.

  “People here think that’s a weed,” I said to her, smushing the grass down around us.

  “I think it is beautiful.”

  “In New Orleans they put it in coffee.” I lay down, shivering with the wet.

  I put my arm around her, under her head. Abandoning her flower, she rested her face under my chin and we lay in the sun, not speaking, barely hidden in the grass. A couple sat holding each other on a bench down the shoreline, pointing to the water and gesturing. A middle-aged man walked by with a dog, not noticing us, or pretending not to.

  “We should go back to our clothing,” she said.

  “Stay.”

  She sat up and wrapped her hands around her knees, letting her short brown hair drip across her bare legs, waiting. I watched her subtle movements, and noticed a beauty mark on her back, just under her right shoulder blade, visible above her damp gray shirt. For a moment I watched the muscles in her shoulders somersault as she stroked her legs with her fingertips. We would be leaving soon.

  I sat up and wrapped my arms around my legs, too. She looked at me square and unashamedly, her head resting on her bent knees. I felt my stubble on my forearm as I looked at the lake and the couple sitting on the bench. Cecilia lay back down, silent and still, her chest barely moving with her breath.

  It was time or not. I looked across the lake for a long while. I thought about my home and everything the Great Lakes mean to me. Of my ancestors who lived and died with the water’s fortunes, bathed in it, picked our sad songs on worn-out guitars only for the lake to hear. We had lived with it as a constant companion ever since anyone could remember, like a good dog who never grows old. I thought about my great-uncles and my grandfathers who had tamed the lake in sailing ships, who ate the sweet flesh of perch plucked from her sandy bottom, about the beach where my parents and uncles and grandparents were married barefoot. I looked at it as if it were my last time, as a dying man might look at it, chin to the wind.

  I turned and kissed her. We kissed long and hard and I was on her, first one leg then the other, my body on top of hers, one hand under her head, the other braced against the matted grass. We rocked with the waves licking at the shore, mimicking the motions of our love.

  “Can we make love here?” she whispered. I kissed her neck.

  “Right here? We’re like three steps from the path.”

  She nibbled me on the shoulder. She said something about America, asking about our laws. “Will we get in trouble?”

  The wind coming off the lake was cool. A burden had been lifted. I ran my hand under her shirt, my rough fingers along the smooth olive skin of her back. I gently pressed her against the ground and moved my han
d around her body to her breast. She closed her eyes and arched her back and we were one.

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  A Fence Between Me and the World

  Neighbors baling hay

  We walked back across the path to gather our things. In our place we left the grass matted like snow angels. We found our clothing and began the blissful hike to the bikes. I ran my fingers through the meadow, thinking of nothing.

  We left Belle Isle as the sun was hanging low in the sky. I felt some kind of promise had been made, an international declaration of love, a peace. If I had to leave Detroit for a while, I would. I dunno, we’d figure it out somehow. Andy and Kinga accomplished it, right?

  Back on the block the White Buffalos, the four visiting Dutch artists, were having a barbecue as Cecilia and I rode up, late. All of Forestdale was piled on the lawn. Most of the food was gone and many of the older folks had started to drift off.

  Cecilia and I momentarily parted ways, the brief absence creating anticipation, a secret pebble rolled between fingers in a jacket pocket. Some of the kids were practicing acrobatics and Garrett was in the middle of a handstand, watched closely by smiling children, laughing hysterically. I found a beer.

  The Dutch girls had thrown a party so they could interview each person on Forestdale about how we had met, who we knew, and “how the block is connected.” They had a giant list of questions. They wanted names, dates, and places. Big spools of butcher paper lay unrolled inside, and the women were mapping the relationships on the block as some kind of conceptual art project.

  “We need to interview you, Drew!” shouted the large one who always seemed to be shouting.

  “Ja, Drewbie. We must have you down and get your information. Everyone else has participated,” said the one with the purple pants as she touched each of her fingertips together in turn and nodded.

  “Yeah, sure, give me just—”

  I felt a large hand on my shoulder. “Hey, bro, can I borrow your truck?” It was Monte, the neighbor who had tattooed me.

  “Sure. What for?”

  “The hay wagon’s got a flat.”

  “I didn’t know they were baling today.”

  “They’re trying to finish up before it gets dark.”

  I told him I would get changed and be right back. He encouraged me to hurry.

  “Do you need a pair of gloves?” he called after me as I opened my gate.

  The hayfield’s just a few blocks from Forestdale, a huge lot on which an old school once sat, long since demolished, about the size of four football fields. It’s surrounded by abandoned houses, the ones that are still standing. Paul’s been seeding the lot illegally for years with alfalfa to feed and bed the animals on the block, the pigs and chickens and goats. The rest of it went to the working farm he created at the school where he teaches.

  When Monte and I pulled up, Jake’s Honda pickup was almost full of hay. Monk was on top catching bales thrown by one of Paul’s sons. I asked Monte to drive so I could heave the bales myself.

  “I thought you wanted to junk that truck!” Paul yelled over the engine as he putted by on the tractor. He’d helped me fix it the week before when it had died. Lithe and sinewy, and familiar with mechanics to the point of grace, he had repaired it before I was finished feeling sorry for myself. Then he scurried away, off to the next project.

  Paul’s son climbed in the bed of my truck and stacked the bales we flung up by the baling wire. Andy and Kinga showed up on their bicycles, and Andy, lean and savage, climbed on the truck with it still moving to start catching. Kinga waved and smiled, then grabbed a bale and tossed it to her husband. I had my hands on one and threw it to Paul’s son, who was almost knocked over catching the thing. He righted himself, looked at me cockeyed, then smiled. He stuffed the bale on the stack and I went back to get another.

  That day I didn’t wear gloves. I wanted to feel the prickly grass on the backs of my hands as I gripped the baling wire. I liked the feeling of my muscles working, my shoulders heaving the bricks, my legs on solid ground. I picked up a bale and disturbed a brown field mouse who hopped away. I almost tripped trying not to crush him with my boot.

  The Kemps were wearing shirts Kinga had screen printed. Andy’s was brown and depicted a lumberjack cutting down the incinerator. Kinga’s was white and sleeveless; it pictured a rainbow-colored phoenix-pheasant rising over DETROIT. Her arms were white, hard and smooth like soap. The veins atop Andy’s hands moved with his fingers.

  Paul’s son stood on top of the bales in my truck, stacking from my side, Andy on the other. He had his giant legs spread wide for balance, but even with a good toss, the truck still moved and the bales wiggled like Jell-O. The guys stacked them on top of the cab as we brought more, rising with the tide of the bales. It was twilight, and if you could ever see stars in Detroit they would just have begun to wake their sleepy twinkling eyes to the night. The burned-out houses had a shabby beauty silhouetted by the setting sun.

  “No more,” I said as the leaf springs began to sag and Andy teetered atop the load, taller than a city bus. We let the truck sit idle with the headlights on, and planned where to store the bales and what we should do next. Paul, kneeling on the seat of the tractor to get a better look, circled as ever, trying to get the last bits of hay before dark.

  Community happens like falling in love. You can’t plan it, or force it, or dissect it like a frog. You can’t try to make it happen. It just does, like falling for someone. Sure, a relationship takes work to keep going, but your heart wants what it wants and so do your neighbors’. We stood with our hands on our hips and leaned against the warm hoods, joking and discussing the day’s take.

  Cecilia. I had forgotten about Cecilia. I had forgotten she had wanted to see this so very much. And who wouldn’t? Baling hay in Detroit. I’d have to remember things like that from now on.

  * * *

  The door I’d shucked off the abandoned house had been sitting atop sawhorses on the Forestdale porch for weeks, taunting me. I’d been running around town showing Cecilia the sights and had been neglecting work on the Queen Anne; everything, for that matter. I hadn’t talked to my parents in weeks. Cecilia was at some conference, and so today was the day. I pushed myself out of bed and stepped onto my porch to smoke a cigarette and start thinking about how to start on the door. The view stunned me, and I dropped the lit cigarette between the cracks in the deck and nearly started a fire.

  The entire block was spiderwebbed in varicolored yarn, bright strands in dozens of colors connecting the houses and making a taut canopy across the street. I opened the gate and walked out into the road with my mouth open.

  It must have taken hundreds of skeins of yarn in strands of oranges and greens and blues. The color seemed to flow everywhere, in some places becoming so dense as to provide shade in the morning sun. From my house alone dozens were tied to the porch and shot across the road or drifted around the corner, connected to the neighbors’ houses, which in turn sported their own webs. It was magical, like a scene from Lewis Carroll. Someone must have worked through the night to make it happen.

  A few of my neighbors stood in the street and some of the block kids were attempting to jump off porches and touch the strands. Another group of bigger children had found sticks long enough to strum across the yarn as they ran down the street to make a muted twang. I walked over to Garrett, holding a cup of coffee in his bathrobe on his porch.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s the Dutch girls. Remember those slabs of butcher paper they made us draw all over? This is it. Some kind of map of the community.”

  I missed it on the night of the party, but I remembered filling out the list when I was drunk one evening. They had a map of the block, and questions like, “From whom did you find out about Forestdale? Who brought you here for the first time, who is your closest friend, who has helped you work on your house?” They made us use different colored markers for each question, and the yarn was the fruition. It was beau
tiful.

  But the garbage trucks couldn’t get through without being tangled in the web, so the entire block hauled their Dumpsters to the end of the street for the duration of the yarn incident. It was also strange that people were coming to the community and attempting to explain it to us. I can only imagine what the East Detroit neighbors thought, driving by and walking through. The sight was quite magical, though.

  I went back to work on the door under this new canopy of brightness and candor.

  I first needed to carefully pry up the trim holding what was left of the glass, tiny, mean-looking shards. I threw the Detroit Diamonds out and set the trim aside. I grabbed the Mister Blister heated paint-stripping tool I’d borrowed from a bar owner in Hamtramck for whom I’d been doing some construction work, and got to work bubbling the hideous paint and peeling it like chewing gum with a scraper. Stripping the paint was easy work, daydreaming work.

  Hamtramck is an enclave city surrounded by Detroit and just north of Poletown. Once predominantly Polish, Hamtramck, they now say, is the most diverse two square miles in the United States outside of New York. Something like thirty languages are spoken in the public schools. It’s the kind of place you can see a woman wearing a hijab chasing a basketball in front of a Yemeni restaurant, across the street from a Polish meat market, just a block away from the best Bangladeshi food this side of Dhaka, a stone’s throw from an Albanian night club, while watching the mayor, a painter, dance the waltz at a Polish heritage festival.

  A solid factory town, Hamtramck once had the most bars per capita in the country. You can still walk into taverns packed at 3:30 p.m., just after shift change. When Hamtown’s main factory, American Axle, left in 2012, it lost half its tax base. Yet, because of immigration, mostly by Arabs and Bangladeshis, the population has remained steady and the economy functioning, if limping. In 2016 it elected the first majority Muslim city council in the nation.