by Drew Philp
Get up. Work. Back to Forestdale for a shower. I finally—just before I was to move into my own house—had a shower. I turned it on to warm the water and went to wash my hands after using the toilet.
I recoiled involuntarily.
“Awww, shit.”
There was a mouse in the sink, barely breathing. He was gray and almost cute. I checked the thermometer. Forty-four degrees. The mouse was wet from the slow drip of the faucet. I felt bad for him. He was just sitting there.
It grossed me out, too. Despite my empathy, rodents carry disease, something I couldn’t afford. He didn’t move when I got close to him, but didn’t look physically sick or mangy. I could see his ribs moving with his little mouse breaths, quick, up and down.
I got in the shower without taking care of him right away. Maybe he would leave.
He really fucked up my shower. All I could think of was him, or her. I cut it short, put on my boots, jacket, and some leather gloves. I got a plastic bag, the grocery store kind.
He didn’t even flinch when I picked him up. He had no fear. I looked into his little mouse face, his ribs still pumping in and out. He knew what was coming, as did I. I took no pleasure in it. When I put him in the bag I didn’t even tie it.
As I killed him beneath my foot I heard his bones crunch. Even worse, I could feel the breaking of his tiny skeleton travel through the sole of my shoe, through to my feet, his bones breaking beneath mine. Although I thought it a mercy killing, I purposely extinguished the life of a living thing. I didn’t even have the guts to check and make sure he was dead. I threw the bag in the Dumpster and let the lid fall with a hollow bang.
I wondered who I had become.
* * *
The Harvest Party was finally here, and I was as far along on the house as I was going to get. The winter was going to be rough again, but that wasn’t anything that I hadn’t dealt with before. The loneliness was new. I didn’t have a whole community surrounding me, at least I didn’t think I did. If I was in trouble I couldn’t just yell and people would come running. At least I wasn’t sure they would. I didn’t really know.
I had moved in what little I could of inconsequential value, and came home to take a shower before the festivities. I returned some cans to the liquor store and was able to afford a six-pack so I had something to take to the party. People had started to gather at Paul’s house, the lights had been strung, and savory smells drifted from kitchens.
More people started to show up. People no one knew. Jennie’s band—at that time Jennie and the Sure Shots—was having its CD release at the YES FARM to coincide with the Harvest Party. Somehow a notice made its way into the paper and all kinds of people came. Folks no one had ever met were wandering around Paul’s house eating chili and asking, “Who lives here?” A microcosm of a coming Detroit. It seemed like the block’s response was to get drunk. The hayrides were epic. People filled the street.
The main event that night was the show in the YES FARM. When they threw open the doors there were likely more people inside than had ever been before. Even the fire department showed up, mingled, and drank apple cider. Jake and I had walked down to the station earlier to invite them, and when we knocked on the door a burly man with a crew cut stuck his torso outside.
“What’s on fire?”
They were jolly, and a lot of hand shaking and back slapping went on. Good guys. Jennie looked beautiful in a long white prairie dress and the band was as surprised as everyone else that so many people showed up. Jake became worried about the floor. In one place it was held up only by a single two-by-four.
When the music started everyone began whirling, an untamed rhythm, unbridled movement, a square dance on cocaine, the best of the country in the best of the city—pounding, undulating bodies an organism working as one, a hive of bees with the band as its queen. Someone was in the back banging the hard heels of his cowboy boots into the floor to the beat. Jake had to stop him, the floor beginning to crack. Sweat started to form on the brows of the musicians and they dug in harder, faster, feeling the instruments and coaxing all they had, their music pouring from the stage like the breaking of a dam. If the floor was going to cave in, it was going to happen tonight. The firefighters all left, running to a call, leaving half-drunk cups of apple cider. Emily and Eric left soon after them.
The music ran on. It seemed the band had an endless amount of songs and the crowd would have ridden along if they did. One man was doing a flatfoot dance right onstage, hollering call-backs to the people shouting encouragement in the crowd. I tried to get Gratiot to dance to the rhythm, but he didn’t get it and seemed to be more interested in biting at my hands and eyeing the cupcake table.
Emily and Eric came back, shaken. They looked grave. The call the firefighters had run off to was the bakery where the two artists had set up their concrete cupcakes. We never found out why or how, but the bakery had burned to the ground.
* * *
1. The police who killed her were looking for a murder suspect and followed by an A&E camera crew shooting one of those cheap and exciting real-life cop shows. Aiyana was sleeping on the couch, and the police, dressed as would-be soldiers, threw a flash-bang grenade through the front window, burning the eleven-year-old girl. They didn’t knock. And they had the wrong address.
Accounts differ as to what happened next, but as the police stormed into the house, Aiyana Jones was shot through the head and killed by a bullet fired from a police machine gun. The cops said her grandmother, in the confusion, grabbed the weapon and it went off. The grandmother vehemently denied ever being near the cop. Many people figured the police were jittery and careless, as an officer had been recently shot, and that a round was fired accidentally. (The police could later be seen off duty wearing shirts that read “Execute cop killers,” their service pistols strapped around their thighs.) Some say the round was fired from outside the home, and struck her after passing through a wall.
We do know that an eleven-year-old girl lost her life in a military-style raid on her house, possibly one conducted for the benefit of the cameras. The police chief himself resigned shortly afterward, when his own pitch for a reality show was uncovered. I didn’t know it then, but Aiyana was a relative of my neighbors and had she survived I would have likely watched her dance and eat and play and do kid things at one of the barbecues my neighbors held during the summer and insisted I attend. Instead, she never got to go to school, she never got to fall in love, she never got to be cool.
CHAPTER 7
* * *
The Furnace
A freezing January day
“If someone has the audacity to come into your house,” he told me, “they have the audacity to kill you. You have to protect yourself.”
I had moved into my new home, as had a friend from work. I’d spent the first night alone, as I thought proper, but my buddy had gone through a wicked breakup with his girlfriend and desperately needed a place to stay. He showed up a few days later. This wasn’t his first time living in Poletown and he’d never lived outside of Detroit. He was trying to make enough money to move to Arizona to stay with a brother who had just gotten out of prison and was now in college. I was inclined to listen to his advice about keeping myself safe in the city.
“I dunno, bud, I’m not sure I can shoot a person,” I told him. We were both dead tired from working on the place all day, and sat on the floor drinking beers while the orange light from the woodstove danced across the floor of the nearly empty house.
“Then what are you going to do, take it? You aren’t exactly the biggest guy on the block. You gonna fight some huge dude who grew up here, grew up fighting his whole life? You’re selling woof tickets, man,” he said, gently telling me I was bullshitting.
“Gratiot will be here. Like you said, he’ll find his bark.”
“What if someone poisons him? You know that, right? They poison dogs. When I was a kid someone killed the dog next door. He was a big, mean motherfucker. They put little springs and shavi
ngs of metal in pieces of meat and fed it to him. It cut him all up inside and he died. Then they broke into the owner’s house.”
“I would fuck someone up if they did anything to Gratiot.”
“Now you’re thinking right. How you going to help anyone else if you can’t help yourself? You have to be safe. And you know the cops ain’t coming. This is a decision you made, bro. Self-defense is part of self-sufficiency.”
“You might be right.”
“It’s like a copy of Shakespeare’s complete works. Every household should own a shotgun. You don’t need to ever take it outside or anywhere else. You don’t need to be proud of it. But if someone comes inside—” He shrugged. “If they have the audacity to come inside, they have the audacity to kill you. They have the audacity to rape your girlfriend and they have the audacity to leave you tied up in a corner to watch. I know you have a good heart but you can’t be stupid.”
“I’ll think about it, but I’m too tired right now.” I couldn’t help but think about the mouse I had killed underfoot on my porch.
“You’d best make a decision quick, because now is the time people are going to be testing you. You’re the new kid on the block—literally—they’re going to try and find out what you’re made of. And if you let them mistake your kindness for weakness, well, they may never stop testing you.”
We slept fitfully, the orange shadows of the fire licking at the fear in my dreams. I was able to conquer the constant low-level terror in the daytime, forcing it from my mind by determination of will. But when I was asleep my subconscious ran wild, unbridled from rationality. I’d never had nightmares before, but now my dreams would often involve fire.
The house was pretty bleak: bare stud walls, no hot water, no electricity, no heat. It was all pretty grim. I put the couch in front of the woodstove, put my dishes in milk crates where the kitchen would be, and that was about all I had, aside from my tools.
I borrowed my father’s camping gear, a sleeping bag, propane stove, and gas lantern. The previous winter my uncle had given me many of his tools, including a workbench. He was a hobby carousel horse carver, and was downsizing his house. Many of the tools were quite nice, but they also came with the random leftovers of a workshop active for decades: screws, nails, specialized hand tools, boxes of washers and nuts, bits of wire and string, odd files, sharpening stones, gauges, marking tools and measuring devices, an assortment of plumbing and electrical bits and instruments.
All of this was surprisingly helpful and represented years of collecting. It was a boon especially because I was so desperately broke. If I needed just a few trim nails, say, I wouldn’t have to buy a whole box of them, I could fish some out from the multitude. I tried to set up what I had neatly, but left the workbench clean. I placed my mattress on top of that. I thought getting it off the floor would provide additional warmth and help protect me from any rodent surprises. I parked a small ladder next to the workbench to climb into bed. It was shaping up to be another brutal winter.
My wood supply was already dangerously low due to some locust that I thought would dry in time, but was still wet. I had some ash, the best for burning aside from oak, but not a whole lot, and a reasonable store of maple, which burns hot but quickly. I figured when I ran out I’d burn whatever I could—pallets, scrap, deadwood. I didn’t have to worry too much about fouling the pipe—I was going to build a masonry chimney next summer. At least I would be able to sit by the fire again, although I wouldn’t have friends just a house or two away to keep me warm or company. Much of the serendipity that was necessary for those kinds of interactions was gone, erased by the distance of a short drive. When I was out of sight I would also be out of mind, and I didn’t know my new neighbors well enough yet.
Each time I drove between my house and Forestdale, where I was still charging batteries in the absence of electricity in the Queen Anne, I had seen a dog on a cruelly short leash tied to a fence. Each day the dog seemed to get bigger and meaner and more hyper. I felt bad for him. Maybe I was just imagining it or unfamiliar with it, but the neighborhood had an implacable feeling of menace those first months. Maybe it’s that I was white and I was moving into a neighborhood that was largely black. Maybe it was real.
The neighbors were initially wary of me and I of them. The larger neighborhood was used to Forestdale and the kaleidoscopic people who lived there—once when I was coming out of the liquor store the next block over, someone tried to hustle me. His buddy told him to stop because “he’s one of those white niggers over on Forestdale”—but this was different. The neighbors behind me, the Terrys, were friendly, but they weren’t my friends yet. The other neighbors and I would eye each other from our respective porches, and I’d slip inside the house quickly and inconspicuously, escaping the chance that someone wouldn’t like me, hate me, even. I felt like I had to prove myself to them.
I would tell myself driving back to my house that I would make an effort to get to know my neighbors at every chance. Or at least wave. On my braver days I would, halfheartedly, protecting myself in case they didn’t wave back, pretending I was looking at something else. Sometimes they would wave, others . . . maybe they didn’t see me.
In those first couple of months there was a guy who used to sit in a black car across the street from my house. He knew one of the neighbors, and I had begun to think he was employed by him, maybe to watch me. Or maybe watch over me. I don’t know. But I had the strange sense that he was watching, making reports, even. I would wave at him sometimes. He would never wave back—and he saw me. We settled in together and I stopped waving, but I would always nod, and eventually he nodded, too. His presence started to peter out, and I’ve never seen him again, although he was a constant presence initially. The neighborhood was just as mysterious as when I’d first moved to Detroit from college.
Although Forestdale was within Poletown, and everyone was just about equally poor, people on Forestdale had options. They had college degrees and travel experiences and artistic ability and a sense of self-worth that had largely been encouraged—at least in its gestational period—by society at large. I had these things myself.
But by living in this new area of Poletown, I was stepping into an existing community I didn’t know or necessarily understand. That was the scariest and most depressing part, a starting over of sorts, the fear of entering a room in which you know no one and having to make friends and fit in, by pain of arson, robbery, or death. People not liking me was one thing, but this time the stakes were high. With no one else to do it for them including the police, people had defended their neighborhood themselves for years, and rightly so. I imagined if I had made enough mistakes and really upset people they wouldn’t hesitate to defend it from me, too. I felt naked and vulnerable.
The days were getting shorter and I only had so much light with which to work. I had called the power company the day I moved in, and they said they would be out within three weeks to turn on the power. Three weeks without lights. My body and life had begun to take on the rhythms of nature, sunlight and darkness, cold and warm. Minus the trappings of civilization, the seasons mattered again. Because I didn’t have light I would live by sunrise and sunset. I was closer to nature now, closer to being an animal. I worked and worked and worked. I ate and slept and worked again. There was nothing else but work for me then.
Those first few weeks were a blur of sweat and blood and battery-powered fluorescent lighting. I tiled the shower basin with some cheap tile I’d been given, and hung plastic up over the walls. It looked like the room where the government had experimented on ET, but at least I would be able to get clean when I was able to afford a water heater, which needed to be soon. As much as I hated debt, I needed a shower more, if only to be able to get myself clean and make money.
My roommate was the rare soul whose vast and hard-won personal knowledge of the world hadn’t beaten him down and made him cynical. He was hardworking and helped with the house. His brown-and-white pit bull, Jesse, would play with Grati
ot in the backyard while we worked, nearly in silence. They’d wrestle and growl, Jesse teaching Gratiot how to be a dog while my roommate taught me how to get along in Poletown, gifting me little nuggets of knowledge.
Don’t ever let anyone into your house you don’t know.
Don’t sleep with the security gate bolted in case there’s a fire and you can’t find your keys.
If you have knowledge share it, if you have power give it away, if you have opinions keep them to yourself.
He would organize and clean, and I would wire electricity. I wanted to get as many of the runs accomplished as possible before the power company came, so I wouldn’t have to hook dozens into the box while it was live. I snaked wires through walls and down into the basement, stripped them, added outlets and switches, and hung lights while my roommate’s battery radio played Motown.
“Ain’t no valley high enough,” he sang into a broom handle like a microphone. He pointed at me. I didn’t catch on.
“That’s your line, bro.”
“Oh, yeah. Ain’t no valley low enough,” I sang to the pair of pliers I was holding.
“Together now!”
“Ain’t no river wide enough, to keep me from getting to you, babeeeeee.”
When one of us was hungry, we would eat. When we were tired, we would sleep. And when I was just getting into a groove the power company called. They were going to hook me into the grid, attach me to the rest of the country through three braided aluminum wires, bring me back online with civilization, and, like Prometheus, steal coal from the ground to make light, this kind electric.
