Say Nice Things About Detroit

by Scott Lasser

  The interview was in the Penobscot Building, a structure grand enough to lift her mood. She stood in the lobby and looked at the art deco design of the floor and decided that the city didn’t have to decline forever, that nothing was set in stone. Then she walked over to security and announced herself.

  • • •

  “TELL ME AGAIN,” the interviewer said, “why you want to work in Detroit.”

  He was young, early thirties, she guessed, trying hard to look older. “Look, kid,” she wanted to say, “you’re young—don’t fight that. Enjoy every goddamned fleeting minute.”

  She actually said, “It’s my home.”

  “But twenty years in Los Angeles?”

  “Training. Getting ready for this job.”

  He looked out the window, and she followed his gaze. They were looking north in winter, and it seemed that somewhere over gray Michigan there was a strip of blue sky, a tease. It was two days before Christmas, three after the shortest day of the year. Light was at a premium.

  “I wouldn’t want to work here,” he said.

  “But you do,” she pointed out.

  “Long lines of guys like me in New York and Chicago, but none here.”

  “So you’ve got your reasons, and I’ve got mine.”

  “The last two people we hired left inside a year. They both took jobs where it doesn’t snow.”

  She began to understand that she could have the job if she would just say that she wanted it and she would stay. Of course, she’d need at least a year to really start. She didn’t think it would matter. Everyone else wanted out.

  “I like the snow,” she said.

  “Really? Why?”

  “I miss it.”

  “Then why did you live in L.A. for twenty years?” he said.

  “Lack of imagination,” she said.

  XIX

  CHRISTMAS DAY AND Marlon was playing Call of Duty 4 with E-Call, shooting up Germans like nobody’s business. It was fun, to a point, but it creeped Marlon out how E-Call got off on wasting the enemy, as if there were no life behind it. Which there wasn’t. Still, when Marlon pretended, he pretended fully, till for him it was real.

  Hiding from Elvis but hanging with E-Call was fraying his nerves, making him wake up thinking there was a gun pointing in his face. That was always a possibility. Elvis meant to kill him. He trusted E-Call—they were brothers, they went way, way back—but E-Call had worries of his own, lying to Elvis every damn day. If Elvis found them together, he’d kill the both of them. If Marlon took off, it would take some heat off E-Call. Marlon figured he owed his brother that much.

  He got up to take a leak, stood over E-Call’s ancient toilet, and thought of the guys he used to know who were gone, BB and Crick and Lionel, all dead, and Shocker, who took a bullet in the spine and was now stuck in a chair, shitting into a plastic bag, maybe even worse off than the other three. It was how things went and he’d known it all along, though lately he’d felt it more.

  “How many gangsters make it to thirty, Marlon? Answer me that.” Dirk had said this on the last night of his life. But that was in July, when thirty seemed far away and very old. Now, for some reason, it didn’t.

  “Gotta go,” Marlon told E-Call when he got back from the can.

  “Man, you sure took a long time in there. Where you going now?”

  “Ypsi. My mom’s.”

  “Why?”

  “Christmas, man.”

  “See you on the flip side.”

  Marlon wanted to take E-Call to his mother’s so E-Call didn’t have to be alone. It was Christmas, and Marlon thought everyone should have a place to go. I ain’t coming back, Marlon wanted to tell him, but he didn’t. Easier for E-Call that way. No farewell. No knowledge that he’d have to keep secret. That was the best way—you just didn’t show up. No goodbye but most definitely gone.

  • • •

  HE DROVE OUT I-94 to Ypsi. The road was damn near empty, except for some sorry-ass truckers who didn’t have a better place to be than on the road. There was something sad about it. He thought again about how he should have brought E-Call, but he needed to let E-Call be and he wanted to keep his mother separate from the rest of his life. It was her best chance. Today she prepared one of her spectacular meals. After prayers and a couple gifts—he’d bought her an i-Pod and loaded it up with that old music she liked—they ate, almost in silence.

  “Just want you to know, Mom, that from this day on, I’m going straight.” He was at the sink now, helping her dry dishes, his stomach so full he was thinking he wouldn’t eat tomorrow, the first day of his new life.

  “That’s good,” she said.

  “And I’m gonna get my GED.”

  “Your father always wanted you to go to college.”

  “I don’t know about that. But the GED, I’ll get that, just like Dad.”

  “The GED is a start,” his mother said. “But fathers, they always want their sons to go further.”

  “Something the matter?” he asked, knowing there was; he could hear it in the way she talked, softly, as if she could barely get the words out.

  She handed him a plate. “I worry,” she said.

  “I’m gonna be clean, get me a job, with hours and all. Solid-citizen stuff.”

  “What happened?” she wanted to know.

  “I’m older, is all. Been remembering Dad, and Dirk, thinking maybe they were on to something. Sometimes, for me, it’s like they’re still here. Like ghosts or something. I had that feeling today, like I was going to walk in here and Dad would be washing up for dinner, scrubbing that steel plant off of him.”

  “I get that feeling sometimes, too,” his mother said. She thought a moment and then wanted to know what kind of work he was going to look for.

  “Bartending. I’m good at it.”

  “You’ll be out late, when all the trouble happens.”

  “You worry too much,” he told her. “Bartending you make good money, cash tips, and they got smoking outlawed pretty much everywhere now, so the air’s good. Lot better than some steel plant. I can go to school in the day. I’ll get further than Dad. You’ll see, Mom.”

  With that his phone started ringing. She looked at him as if she were accusing him; he looked down at the number: 303. Where the hell was that? Wasn’t 313, Detroit, or 312, Chicago. He answered it.

  “Marlon, it’s David Halpert.”

  “Yo,” Marlon said. “Give me a sec.” To his mother he said, “It’s my lawyer.”

  “Why you need a lawyer? And what kind of lawyer calls on Christmas?”

  “He’s the lawyer, how should I know?” Marlon set the towel on the counter and made for the living room.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  “Been thinking about your proposal,” David said.

  “You been thinking good,” Marlon said.

  “How’s that?”

  “You don’t call a brother on Christmas to give him bad news.”

  “You got me there, Marlon. But I’ve got conditions.”

  “Ground rules?” Marlon said.

  “You could call them that,” said David.

  “Then tell me what you need.”

  XX

  DAVID HUNG UP the phone and paced around his living room. It was an impetuous decision, though maybe, he thought, a mitzvah, a deed done because it needed to be done and he could do it. It would be good to have someone in the house. Marlon was a black kid twenty years younger, and maybe he could be good company. Certainly he needed guidance.

  Mostly David missed Cory. All the strain of fathering seemed like nothing compared to not being able to do it at all. It was a loss at the center of him, searing and eternal. David knew he was looking for a second chance and that he’d never really get one, not the exact one he was looking for. Still, other chances would come around, and he intended to make use of them.

  He found himself strolling along his bookcases, looking at the cloth spines of the books. “They’re all Dirk’s,” Shelly had exp
lained. “He collected books, could never throw one away.”

  “And the covers?” David asked.

  “I took them off. Didn’t like the way they shined in the light, all garish and cheap.”

  Now, at the end of a shelf, David noticed an envelope, and he pulled it out. Actually there were three, all addressed to Dirk, “c/o The Bookers,” in “Detroit, Mich.” There was no zip code. David checked the postmarks: 1958 and 1959.

  David pulled a letter from one of the envelopes. It started, “My dearest little boy,” and it was signed, “Love, Mommy.” The script was odd, difficult to read. A letter from Tina to Dirk.

  David read all three. In the letters Tina professed her love and lamented that they lived apart. It baffled David: they were separated by just a few miles, and yet they had their own personal 8 Mile running right through the family.

  David fetched a legal pad from his briefcase, sat in one of the living room’s reading chairs, and wrote his own letter. “Dear Cory,” it started.

  I miss you as I would miss life itself. If I could be with you, then I would be with you. They say if you save one life you save the whole world. If I could have saved you it would have saved our world, yours and mine. But I couldn’t. I am sorry about that, and mostly I am sorry about how I left things with you. I can’t change that. But there is this one other life I can change, so I will. I am letting someone live in my house. He is a young man who needs a little help, and I am going to give it to him. Just as I would have given it to you.

  Love, Dad

  He folded up the note and slid it between two of the envelopes that contained Tina’s letters. Then he put them all back where he found them, now his own personal Wailing Wall. He stepped back. It felt, oddly, as if the world had changed. And then the phone rang.

  XXI

  IT WAS STILL Christmas, and she was driving to the city to see David at Dirk’s house. All the Christmases of her life she had never once visited it.

  She’d called him and said that she had to see him right away, and of course he had agreed. It was time. She couldn’t keep putting it off. Having the baby was her decision, and if he wanted nothing to do with the child, she would accept that. She would have to accept it, but she didn’t want it to go that way. She also didn’t want an offer of marriage—it was too soon, and she was still technically married, in any case. She just wanted him to accept the situation, to let her stay in his life, and he in hers, and to agree that somehow they would raise the child. She was asking for just one simple thing: the possibility of a future.

  “Did someone die?” he asked when he opened the door. She entered the house. He looked exhausted. It was a little after ten. She had promised nine and was late, as usual.

  “Honestly,” he said, “I’ve been trying to come up with what you felt was so important that you had to come down here in the middle of the night on Christmas to tell me.”

  “Can we sit down?” she asked.

  “Is it about Dirk?”

  “What about him?”

  “Have they found anything out? Anything about what happened?”

  “They’ve got shell casings and slugs, but no guns that match. They’ve gone through several dozen of his old cases to see if this was payback of some kind. People on parole, that sort of thing. They’ve found nothing.”

  “So they still have no idea?”

  “No.” Her feet were hurting. “Can we sit down?”

  They went to the living room, where months before she had sat with her mother and Shelly and looked at the pictures of her dead brother. Now she sat and took a deep breath. She had practiced a preamble, but she dispensed with it. “David,” she said, “I’m pregnant. With your baby.”

  He just stared at her, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d heard. She wished he would say something. Anything. She had an odd feeling, as if she were about to be hit by lightning.

  “I’m not asking for anything from you,” she told him, and then she went into the speech she’d practiced in the car, how this had been her choice, she didn’t want to pressure him into anything. She also felt he had the right to know, it was—

  He held up his hand.

  “Are you telling me you don’t want me involved?”

  “No,” she said. “I’d like you involved. I’d really like it.”

  “Good.”

  There was a long silence. Why, she wondered, wasn’t he saying anything? For a moment she wondered if he’d heard her, or if she’d said anything at all.

  “That’s all you’re going to say?” she asked. “I mean, David, you and me, I’ve been thinking we’ve got a chance, you know, but then there’s this baby, and that puts all this pressure on it. All this responsibility. I want to do it right, and I hope that I can do it right with you. But it’s—”

  “I had a son once,” he said, cutting her off by changing the angle of his shoulders. “And I didn’t think I’d ever have another. Of course I’ll raise this child with you. How could you think otherwise?”

  “It’s soon for us. Maybe too much, too soon.”

  “I don’t believe in that,” he said.

  “In what?”

  “In too much, or too soon. There’s either good or there’s not good. There’s either right or there’s not right.”

  He smiled at her, stood, and walked to her. He held out his hand. She took it and he pulled her to her feet. He put his arms around her. He had a distinct smell, musky now, a man who lived hard, who tried hard. She felt his arms around her ribs. She leaned against him and he let her, holding her. This, she realized, was what she wanted, once in a while to put her weight in a man’s arms. In all her years with Marty, never once had he done anything like this. She felt herself crying.

  “It’s right,” he whispered.

  “How can you know that?”

  “You and me, Carolyn,” he said, “we’ve got nothing to lose.”

  Summer 2006

  I

  When his phone started to shake, Dirk knew it was Marlon. Dirk had always had that sense; the two of them were connected in that way.

  “Yo, Uncle Dirk, yo,” the kid said.

  “Two yo’s too many,” Dirk said.

  “Just playing with you.”

  It was a sunny day, warm and humid, like most of July. He was out in his driveway, working on the car, moisturizing the leather in the front seat. Marlon didn’t call to check in or to see how the Burtons were making out, and certainly not to invite them out for a meal or a get-together. Marlon called for one reason: he needed something.

  “You need a place to go?” Dirk asked.

  “You mean, like sleeping?” Marlon said. “Yeah, I was thinking I might use a few nights.”

  “Why don’t you move in?” Dirk said. “Stay with us.”

  “That would be with your ground rules,” Marlon said.

  “You know the deal, if you’re ready for it.” Dirk had made this offer many times before. He made it as an offering to Everett, and he made it because, despite Marlon’s poor behavior, he liked the boy and wanted to help him.

  “Maybe,” Marlon said.

  Dirk dropped his rag, stood up in the sunshine. Marlon had never said “maybe” before. “Talk to me, son.”

  “Thought we could negotiate,” the boy said.

  “Negotiate? Negotiate what?”

  “Ground rules. Like you call ’em.”

  “There’s a reason they’re called ground rules and not ground suggestions.”

  “Want to make sure we’re communicating,” Marlon said. This was one of Dirk’s lines, coming back at him. Marlon did that often.

  “They are my rules,” Dirk said. He wanted to take Marlon in, but not if his house would be used as a base for a career in the drug trade. He’d spent his whole life fighting it, and there was some irony he just couldn’t take. Not that he’d ever thought he’d win the long fight with the dealers, but he had won the short ones. His own survival was proof of his victory. Sooner or later all the drug dealers went away.
That was certain. It was why he wanted to help Marlon get out before it was too late.

  “I was just thinking at dinner we might get it all worked out,” Marlon said. Dirk had also taught him this. It was why interrogations could take forever. No one just came out and said what he had to say. Often he had to say everything else first.

  “Okay, dinner will work,” Dirk said. “You need a ride?”

  “I’m good on the ride. I was thinking Greektown.” Marlon loved Greek food. And Lord knew the kid needed to eat.

  “Greektown, then.”

  “Bring your sister,” Marlon said.

  “My sister?”

  “The white girl.”

  “What for?”

  Marlon had met Natalie on a chance encounter, down on the esplanade by Hart Plaza. Marlon had been up to no good, Dirk was sure. This was back in May, an evening with the same milky sky and warm air as now. “Meet my sister,” Dirk had said at the time.

  “Your sister?”

  “Same momma.”

  “Damn,” Marlon said.

  “You’re Everett’s son,” said Natalie. After that, Marlon changed, dropped the swagger and acted almost human, merely from hearing his father’s name. Dirk had never felt that hearing his own father’s name, but often fathers were like that, Dirk had noticed, both a burden and a blessing.

  “Be good to have a third party there,” Marlon said. He wanted Natalie to be the referee.

  “You can trust me to do what I say I’ll do. You know that.”

  “I’m just saying, you and me, we don’t always see the world the same way,” Marlon said. “She can be like the Judge Judy.”

  Dirk heard something off in Marlon’s voice. “You in trouble?” he asked.

  “I’m good.”

  “Seven, then.” The line went dead. There was no mention of the restaurant, but they always went to the same place, the New Parthenon, right there in downtown Detroit.

  Dirk slid the phone into his pants, looked up, and saw Shelly watching him from the front door. He knew himself to be a lucky man, and most of this was because of her. All these years and he was still in love with her. Even the passion he had felt for her at the beginning could still well up in him. They agreed on almost everything. There was really only one issue between them.