by Scott Lasser
“You know anyone in L.A.?” David asked.
“Not really. But I got some money in the bank. I could get a place, find a job.”
“Start over,” David added.
“Change my life, like you said.”
“Let me ask you something,” said David. He put his head down, and Marlon could see how the hair was thinning, pulling back from the forehead, just as Dirk’s had, even after he started shaving it close. Suddenly David looked up.
“Have I made a difference to you?” he asked.
“What you mean?”
“Your life. Have I made it better?”
“Sure,” Marlon said. It was an odd question. Marlon could never figure out why this guy cared. But it was true, he’d made a difference. Marlon had been studying him. He was quiet, and seemed comfortable alone. He was a lawyer and he had money, so Marlon figured this was proof that you could do better bending the law than breaking it. David seemed to enjoy teaching, and so Marlon picked up bits and pieces of civilian knowledge. He could go all sorts of places now—the bank, restaurants with white people—and hardly feel out of place. The world was getting bigger by degrees. “You’re helping,” he told David. “For sure.”
“Good enough for me,” David said. “I’m going to bed.”
VI
HE WENT TO work dutifully, helping Detroiters plan for death. Most of the clients lived in the suburbs, but David didn’t make the distinction, the way they did. They were all Detroiters to him, just as they would all be dead. There was a wonderful equality to it. The only thing he couldn’t abide was the death of the young, but the young were never his clients. The young didn’t plan to die, and that was fine with David.
He needed Tiger tickets, so he walked into Bergen’s office for advice. Bergen was on the phone but waved him in. Out the window was a beautiful day, the sky a royal blue with white stripes of wispy clouds. Below David could make out trees along some of the streets, coming alight with green leaves, and he couldn’t help but feel his spirits lift. It was spring and he was going to a baseball game.
Bergen hung up the phone. “You’re hitting the cover off the ball,” Bergen said.
“How’s that?”
“You billed two hundred and seventeen hours in March?”
“Sounds right.”
“Look, you keep this thing going, you can hire another lawyer. Hell, we’ll have a whole trust department.”
David had never seen Bergen quite so animated. He mentioned his need for tickets.
“Got a buddy who knows one of Illitch’s kids,” Bergen said. “I’ll get you set up. What game?”
“Any game.”
“Pick one,” Bergen said. “Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want.”
• • •
HE ALWAYS FELT a jolt when he walked into a stadium and saw the green of the field. Bergen had given him tickets for box seats along the third base side, close to the Tigers’ dugout. Russell Wilson was smiling as though he’d won the lotto. “You spend a fortune?” Wilson asked. “Or are you hooked up?”
“I know someone who’s hooked up.”
“Same thing,” said Wilson.
Over the outfield bleachers David could see the buildings of downtown Detroit, a skyline that appeared prosperous. There was some beautiful architecture right outside the stadium. By the fifth inning David had dropped seventy bucks on hot dogs and beer. The sky had turned dark, and only half of those downtown buildings had lights on. He turned his attention back to the food. Wilson said that anything eaten in a box seat tasted as good as a meal at the London Chop House, and David thought there was truth to this. The common pleasures were usually the best pleasures, in spite of what he’d often been led to believe.
David missed the old Tiger Stadium, but not because it was better. He just wanted to be young again. Still, no one here was sitting behind a steel girder. There was plenty of room to come and go. One had the sense of progress. Also, David thought this might have been the first time in his life he was out socially with a black person. It was a funny idea, really. He’d grown up in Detroit, not, say, in Alabama; he’d lived in Seattle and Denver, places he’d thought of as reasonable about race, if not entirely enlightened. But the truth was that the Detroit he’d known had been as segregated as Johannesburg, and it wasn’t much different now.
“Mind if I ask you an odd question?” It was between the sixth and seventh. The Tigers, three-quarters Hispanic, were warming up.
“Do I have to answer it?” said the judge.
“Do you have any white friends?”
“A couple,” he said. “I know plenty of white folk, though. I worked in the courts.”
“You’d think by now—” David started to say.
“No, you wouldn’t, David. You really wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because you wouldn’t.”
• • •
THE TIGERS WON. Afterward, the mood on the street was buoyant as the fans walked to their cars. The air was still warm, a hint of the summer at hand. David and Wilson walked shoulder-to-shoulder with everyone else. In this street black mixed with white.
“What happened to you?” Wilson asked.
“What do you mean?”
“A Jewish boy doesn’t move from Denver back to Palmer Woods, where there are no Jews left, just on a whim. Something happened. You’re fleeing disbarment, an embezzlement charge, tax evasion, something.”
“I lost my son.”
“Lost? Lost, as in died?”
David nodded.
Wilson stopped walking. “Marlon Booker won’t change that.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know that you do,” Wilson said.
• • •
HE DROPPED WILSON at his door. Wilson thanked him and got out of the car. David pulled into his own garage, but Wilson had come back across the strip of lawn that separated the two properties.
“What is it?” David asked.
“You know, when Dirk died and Shelly put the house up for sale, I was worried what would happen, who would move in. So I just want to say what I think you understand: I’m glad you’re my neighbor.”
David thanked him. There wasn’t much more you could say to that, so David headed into his house. He thought that if your neighbors wanted you around, then maybe you were home.
VII
HOW TO BE a good mother: that was the question. She vowed that she would do better with this child than she’d done till now with Kevin, that she would concern herself less with progress and maturation and more with listening to him, whoever he would be. She would relax. She didn’t have to prove anything to anyone.
Kevin came home from school wanting to sleep over at Bruce Silsby’s house on Saturday. Carolyn had never heard of this boy, and so she called the mother, whose name was Helen, to talk about the logistics.
“It might have been nice if Bruce had told me,” said Helen Silsby, “but it’s fine. We’ll be here.” Then she added, “Kevin seems to be adjusting quite well.”
“I think so.” It always spooked Carolyn when a complete stranger knew her son.
“I heard Bruce talking with another boy about him. The California Kid, they call him.”
“I guess it fits,” Carolyn admitted, though it was still odd to say. In Michigan, she’d noticed, no one asked you where you were from. If you were here, you hadn’t come from someplace else.
She set a time with Helen Silsby. Then she called David and told him she was free.
VIII
MARLON KEPT A small tire iron under the driver’s seat. It was for protection—no one needed tire irons anymore to change tires—and for what he would use it for now. He entered the house through the side door, carefully closing it, listening. There was just the sound of the heat, which still kicked on at night, the old furnace rumbling like the start of an earthquake.
Inside his room he carefully moved his bed and then used the tire iron to lift the floorboards. There it was, al
most four hundred $100 bills, stacked into piles of thirty and bundled with rubber bands. He fit some of it in the bottom of his suitcase, some in a duffel bag, a third stash in his backpack. E-Call had taught him this: when thieves found a bag of money, they usually thought they had it all. “You separate,” he said, “ ’cause shit goes down.”
He packed the clothes he thought he’d need, leaving winter stuff behind, trying to make it seem like he’d be back, though he decided to take the black pants, white shirt, black vest, and tie he wore at the bar. He replaced the floorboards and carried the three bags out to his car. It was a 1995 Escort, a little blue thing with a spoiler he’d picked up at a used car lot by paying cash. He spread the bags around as best he could. He wrapped up about ten grand in a couple T-shirts and stored it in the spare-tire well, along with the little mule that he’d never used. It occurred to him that he should leave something for David. He understood there was no way to repay him, and that, amazingly, David didn’t expect to be repaid. He just did what he did, and Marlon decided that someday he would do something like that and this would be the true way he paid David back. But for now some gesture was required, so he grabbed a bundle of bills from the wheel well, three G’s. He locked the car and went back inside.
It was moving on to four. He didn’t want David to know right away that he was gone, and so he had to find a hiding place for the cash. He settled on the freezer—Cold cash, he thought—and hid the money behind a stack of Lean Cuisine frozen dinners he found there. That was really the final piece. His heart was starting to race. He was making his break. In three or four days he’d be a new man in the sunshine. It occurred to him he’d need a new name, but that was easy enough. He just needed to think one up, and there would be thousands of miles for that.
In his room he looked things over and collected the $1805 he’d saved up from the bar. This he would give to his mother. He knew she wouldn’t want the drug money, but this eighteen hundred bucks he’d earned the honest way and she lived just off I-94. He had to take 94 to get to 80, which would take him all the way to Nebraska, where he’d pick up 76 down to 70. From there you drove to Utah and took 15 all the way to L.A. He’d memorized the route, as well as the names of many of the towns along the way, and not just Chicago and Denver and Las Vegas but DeKalb and Des Moines, Ogallala and St. George, Mesquite and Barstow. Places he’d never seen, or could even imagine.
He went to the kitchen for mint tea. He thought it might slow his heart. He wished he could wait until he knew Elvis was no longer after him, but with Monique seeing him, it was only a matter of time until they came to the bar. He’d heard of guys getting killed for a lot less than forty grand. Seen it, too, one junkie trying to rip and run and getting shot by E-Call before he got ten feet. Then E-Call walked up and shot him in the head while he was still alive. They left the body there, then drove down to the river and threw the gun in. “You can’t let that happen,” E-Call had explained. “It was him or me.” This scared Marlon, because when it came to “him or me,” he worried that he still wouldn’t be able to pull the trigger. He was in the wrong line of work. Below them, the water sloshed by, greenish and roiling. Marlon imagined the gun on the bottom of the river, stuck in the mud on the American side.
For weeks after, he kept waiting for the police to come around asking questions, but they never did. This almost made it worse. He couldn’t help but notice that life ended quickly, at any moment. A shot, a gun dropped in the river, and no one came looking for you. You just disappeared, like time itself.
Marlon found a legal pad on the table. He tore off a sheet and wrote a note. He stuck it in some dishes so it would take David at least a few days to find it, and then he headed outside.
There was dew on the grass—he could feel it making his shoes wet—and then he got to his car and heard a voice call his name. A low voice. Elvis. Immediately, before even he turned around, he felt himself change, as if the inside of him had just collapsed and yet he was still standing there, an empty shell. He shivered; he was freezing. He thought, I’m so close. So damn close. He made himself turn.
It wasn’t Elvis. It was the old guy who lived next door, Mr. Wilson, the retired judge who seemed to have forgotten he was retired. A real busybody. He was standing in the shadow thrown by the outside garage lights, which he never turned off.
“Packing out?” he asked.
“Taking some stuff to my mom.” He had thought he was going to die.
“Awful early.”
“She lives out in Ypsi,” Marlon said. “Works early.”
“You’re not stealing anything from David, now, are you?”
“No, sir. I’d never. I ain’t no thief.”
The judge eyed him in the darkness. Marlon had the feeling Wilson wanted to frisk him.
“You realize what that man has done for you?” Wilson asked.
“Sure.” Marlon’s mouth was so dry he could barely get the word out.
“No, I don’t think you do. But someday you might.”
The judge turned and walked back to his house. Marlon was still damp with fear. He had sweated through his shirt, and, worse, he’d pissed himself. It was dark and he didn’t think the judge had seen it. He thought he heard something and he stopped again, his soaked pants clinging to his thighs. He took a breath and held the air down in his lungs. Through the quiet he heard a bird, then two of them, announcing the dawn.
IX
RUSSELL WILSON WAS waiting for him when he got home, standing at the edge of the driveway in that tracksuit. “Sorry I missed you this morning,” he said, “but I think Marlon took off today. You better check the house.”
“Check the house for what?” David asked.
“Anything missing.”
David invited him in, but Wilson said he’d stay on the lawn. Inside everything seemed normal. David had some cash he kept in his sock drawer along with his passport, but both were still there. Only Marlon’s room looked different. Clothes still hung in the closet and there were a few things in the drawers, but it looked emptier than the last time David had been here. There was no extra pair of sneakers on the floor, no baseball caps on the one chair, no dirty clothes on the floor. Still, David couldn’t believe Marlon would just leave like that, without even a goodbye. There had to be some reasonable explanation.
As David walked from the closet, he tripped over something and had to put his hand down on the bed. He found a small tire iron on the floor. Odd, he thought.
Outside, in the sunshine, he told Wilson everything was in order, though it also seemed possible that Marlon was gone.
“You aren’t happy about that?” Wilson asked.
“No. I like the kid.”
Wilson shook his head.
“I can’t believe he didn’t say goodbye,” David said.
“You go back inside, you look for the thing that has the most value to you, and you make sure it’s there. Then you have the locks changed and count your blessings.”
David went back in. He knew nothing was missing, but to be sure, he checked the bookshelf for the letters he’d written to Cory. They were still there. He sat down to write another.
X
CAROLYN HAD BIG plans for the evening, but by the time she got to David’s she didn’t feel like going out. Pregnancy had a way of doing that.
“But I made reservations at the Wendy’s on Livernois,” David said. When she smiled at him, he said, “Would you believe Joe Muer’s?” Even she knew it had been torn down. In fact, he’d made reservations at an Italian place. He called to cancel and then went to put a frozen pizza in the oven. Even before it was baked she was so tired she could barely speak. She asked him to do the talking. “Tell me something about you I don’t know,” she said, and that’s when she got the full story of his lost son, of the fight and the yelling and the slap and the permanent inability to make it right. She learned that he wrote the dead boy letters, even though there was no place to send them. She found it sad and beautiful and somehow comforting.
• • •
SOON THEY WERE heading upstairs. She had asked for this. “Will you sleep with me but not sleep with me?” was how she’d put it. She was too tired for sex, too big, too . . . unsexy. But if he would lie beside her and hold her and sleep with her through the night, then she would be happy.
As she walked into the bedroom, she saw a piece of metal on the bed.
“It’s a tire iron,” David explained. “Marlon left it behind.”
“Why’s it here?”
“I figure I can use it for protection,” he said.
“Why not get a gun?”
“God, if I had a gun, I’d probably get depressed and shoot myself.”
“See, David,” she said, “that’s the difference between you and me. If I had a gun, I’d probably get depressed and shoot someone else.”
• • •
SHE SLEPT WELL, but then woke to pee. Afterward, she couldn’t get back to sleep. It was about half past midnight. She decided to go downstairs and make some tea. That was one thing she knew about David: he had tea. She thought again about him writing letters to his dead son. It was a bizarre thing to do, but she didn’t mind that he was doing it. He’d lost a son, and you had to allow him a little craziness.
XI
HE HEARD PEOPLE downstairs. He opened his eyes and saw darkness, didn’t know where he was, and then recognized the ceiling, his room, the new one. He reached over for Carolyn, but the bed was empty.
He rose, put on his robe. It was a little after one according to the green light of his alarm clock. He thought he heard walking, boots on the hardwood floors. Marlon, perhaps, come back with friends. Or maybe just Carolyn. He walked to the stairs and called down to her.
“Don’t come down!” came the reply, her voice so distraught, so panicked, that it created the same feelings in him: he felt his bowels slacken and sweat form on the back of his neck.
“Get down here,” said a voice. Low, male, black.
David stopped, turned, went back to the bedroom for the tire iron. It was cold in his hand, and it occurred to him that he’d fetched it without thought, as if the instinct to have a weapon were simply inside him. Now he wished he’d gotten a gun, not that he’d ever fired one. He’d grown up in the suburbs. As for tire irons, he’d used one once, when Carter was president, to change a tire.
