He wondered if Joyce would still write her article.
Needles was the last of the M-and-M’s to be arraigned. Bail was set at twenty-five hundred dollars. As the officer was leading him out, Doc went up to the clerk, got an accounting of the total bond for the seven Marshals—it came to $25,000, including Yarnell, who had had a bench warrant out for his arrest for failure to appear on a cocaine possession charge and whose bail was consequently set at $7,500, and a member Doc didn’t know who had five thousand slapped on him for an incident in the police van on the way to headquarters—and armed with his receipt climbed into the Coachmen and drove down to the jail, a slab of gray granite covering an entire city block that made no attempt to look like anything but what it was. The black-enameled bars in the windows were as big around as Doc’s ankles.
His instructions from Ance had ended twenty minutes ago. He waited another half hour for Needles. When he appeared, having traded his county blues for khaki parachute pants and an old green corduroy shirt unbuttoned to expose his smooth hairless chest, Doc offered him a ride. He shrugged, handed the clerk a receipt for his gold watch, chains, and a couple of hundred dollars in folded tens and twenties, and accompanied Doc out the door.
“Where can I drop you?” Doc asked, turning the key in the ignition.
Needles directed him to a men’s clothing store on Gratiot.
“Buying a suit?”
“I live there.” He slouched down and rested his head on the back of the seat.
Doc cracked the window on his side. His passenger smelled of that sweet dispenser soap they used at the jail.
The store occupied the ground floor of a two-story brick building of thirties vintage and had the look of a place that had always been there, acknowledging the changing scene by replacing the old baroque cash register with a computer and cautiously adjusting the lapels and cuffs on the mannequins in the windows. Illuminated indirectly by tracks aimed at the walls and not at all through the plate-glass front in the perennial shade of taller buildings on all four sides, it was a cube of gently bred silence sandwiched between a deep pile carpet the color of the blood of an earlier generation and thick cork panels in the ceiling. When the door opened a gong sounded that might have been under water. Entering with Needles Lewis, Doc felt the same muting sensation he had felt upon stepping across the threshold of the Brown & Kilmer Funeral Home.
A beautiful old man almost as tall as Doc in a gray flannel three-piece that looked as soft as smoke, with a mane of thick hair to his collar and a spade-shaped beard, both too white not to have been helped along chemically, started their way across the carpet, then saw Needles and stopped. Doc was sure he bowed. Needles passed him without saying anything, embroidering a path between racks of suits and shirts stacked on shelves and trousers hung by their cuffs in rows like hanging files, and went through a door at the back marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Doc followed hesitantly. He wasn’t sure he was expected to, but Needles had made no sign of farewell.
Behind the door the store’s elegant facade disintegrated rapidly. A twelve-foot hallway with brown linoleum worn down in patches to the concrete slab beneath led past tall fly-specked windows that Doc realized when he looked through them were the backs of two-way mirrors offering a view of the dressing rooms. He had heard that such things existed in some establishments to prevent shoplifting, but this was his first evidence of them, and he resolved never again to try on a pair of trousers in a store.
Around a corner and up a steep flight of stairs with a rubber runner that looked as if it had been used to sharpen knives, and Doc stopped abruptly on a dim landing to avoid colliding with Needles, who had paused to knock on a door without markings. The knock was a complicated one; Doc was still working it out when the door opened two inches. No light came out from the other side.
“Me,” Needles said. “I brung someone.”
“Who?”
“A friend. His name’s Doc.”
Doc was aware he was being scrutinized. After a moment a switch snapped and light knifed out onto the landing, dazzling him. The door opened the rest of the way. Doc followed Needles on through.
The apartment, if that’s what it was, took up the whole second floor, with doors leading to what were probably a bedroom and bathroom. A buff-and-blue rug that looked Eastern and expensive covered the hardwood floor to within four feet of the walls, which were painted a luminous blue that hurt Doc’s pupils, still adjusting from the gloom of the landing. The sofas and upholstered chairs looked new. There were two refrigerators, a stove, microwave, and two-basin sink, a TV with a forty-eight-inch screen, a CD stereo on a shelf with four six-foot speakers spotted around the room, and a waist-high counter with a Formica top covered with beakers and a Bunsen burner and other items Doc had seen in old mad-scientist movies. He was a moment figuring that one out. He didn’t have to figure out the folding card table in the corner with its assortment of semi-automatic pistols and what looked like an Uzi knocked down into a dozen components. There were boxes of cartridges everywhere, even on the sofa cushions.
The man at the door closed and locked it. He was black, not much taller than five feet, with a large, close-cropped head and the compact hard-muscled frame of a circus acrobat in a blue knit polo shirt, gray twill slacks, and what looked like alligator shoes dyed to match the slacks. Doc figured the shoes alone had cost more than either of his own two suits. The man was holding a square black MAC-10 machine pistol that looked something like a toaster on a handle. He was perhaps nineteen.
“Sure he ain’t wearing a wire?” he asked Needles.
“Sure. Whyn’t you clean this place up? You expecting a fucking war, spicks gonna come up here from Colombia and tip over the block?”
“I seen him someplace. Thirteen hundred, maybe.”
“Jesus Christ, he bailed me out. He works for Maynard Ance. This here’s Doc Miller. He played ball.” To Doc: “Sylvanus got busted once on account of a snitch was wearing a wire. Now he frisks his mama.”
“Wire caught fire, that’s why they didn’t get enough to keep me.” Sylvanus was showing all his teeth. He had a lot of jaw and it looked like the grille of an old Buick. “Jump around and slap his chest like a big old bird. His cop friends thought he was getting done. Bust in and throw me down and kneel on top of me and screw they pieces in my ears, call me nigger and motherfucker. Judge throwed it all out. No probable cause, he said. I had sixteen kilos in a suitcase under the bed.” He changed hands on the MAC-10 and stuck out his right. “I’m Silly Dee.”
“That’s his rap name,” Needles said. “Sylvanus Porter don’t rhyme so easy.”
Sylvanus broke off the handshake, deposited the machine pistol on the card table, and moved to a more formidable weapon, the stereo, switching it on. The floor thumped to the beat of recorded synthesizers. Bouncing with it, he sang: “I’m Silly Dee and it seems to me crack’s just the way we stay in the play ’cause the white man barks we can’t play his park ’cause we’re just too dark ’less we gots the green to make his team.”
He was starting a second chorus when Needles flipped off the machine. “Sylvanus got M. C. Hammer scared shitless. Meantime he’s the best cooker in town.”
“Cooker?”
“We don’t grow that shit.” Sylvanus jerked his thumb toward the chemical apparatus on the counter.
He’d retreated into his earlier dark mood. No musician liked to have his performance interrupted.
Doc asked, “Do they know downstairs what you’re doing up here?”
Needles had opened one of the refrigerators. He offered Doc a Stroh’s, got turned down, and took one for himself, using an opener under the sink. “What they know don’t mean shit. M-and-M’s own this building.” He put away a third of the bottle’s contents in one swig.
“I didn’t know the Marshals had that kind of money.”
Needles and Sylvanus laughed. It was almost as loud as the synthesizers had been. Needles carried his beer through one of the doors, leaving it open behind him. A
moment later clothes started flying out into the room: suits and shirts and leather jackets, silver Windbreakers and silk blazers, flocks of knits, schools of sharkskins, herds of ankle-length fur coats. Eelskin boots and Italian shoes with buckles and pointed toes, Reeboks in every color and size from nines to double-digits like basketball players wore, Nikes for muddy days, patent-leather pumps for evening in a town that had no nightlife. In a couple of minutes the rug was covered, colors splashed all over like a light show. Needles came out in a pair of red bikini underpants, pulling on an Adidas T-shirt and swilling Stroh’s, kicking clothes. “I growed up on Mt. Elliott,” he said. “Sylvanus was Erskine. Summers we went barefoot. Winters—winters was big; then we got to wear our brothers’ shoes that didn’t fit them no more. I was twelve the first time I seen anybody wearing a suit and tie outside of television. He axed me for directions. You got a father?”
“Just barely,” Doc said.
“I never did. Sylvanus didn’t neither. Yarnell’s old man been locked up in Marquette since Yarnell was six. Creed’s old man bust his heart working at Ford’s. Closest thing I ever had to a father called himself Fly. He said he seen Superfly twenty-six times. He was fourteen when I met him, had him a green Testarossa with blocks tied to the pedals because he couldn’t reach them with his feet from behind the wheel. You could cut your finger on his lapels. Cash? Used to give it away in handfuls like hard candy because he said the bulge broke up the line of his suit.”
“Glittered when he walked, huh?”
“Yeah. Yeah!” But he didn’t get the reference. “When the sun come out and hit his rings that boy shined like a new car. Oh, Fly was something to see.”
“Was he selling crack?”
“No, that wasn’t around so much then. He was dealing that Mexican brown heroin. Trouble was, so was somebody else, and they couldn’t get together on who was to do his dealing where. One day this old rusty piece-of-shit El Camino come round the corner on Mt. Elliott and sprayed metal all over. Fly got one in the neck, he bled dry before the ambulance ever come. They hit a little girl, too, and my best friend, Jimmie. The doc at the free clinic pried the bullet out of his leg, Jimmie carried it around for a good luck piece.”
“What about the girl?”
“Oh, she was meat before she hit the sidewalk. That’s what done it, you know what I’m saying? I mean to me.” Needles had selected a pair of jogging pants with a silver stripe on one side from the pile on the floor and paused as he was stepping into them. “It wasn’t them clothes or the rings or that car of Fly’s. I figured if the same bullets that done for him didn’t know any better than to do for that girl too there wasn’t no sense in nothing. So I might as well have the clothes and the rings and the car.”
He pulled up the pants and tugged his T-shirt out over the elastic waistband. “Let me tell you something about that El Camino. I was there and I seen it coming for just the longest time, like it was just hanging there. Floating, you know what I’m saying? Fly and that little girl, they never seen nothing. If you can see it coming, don’t worry about yourself. It ain’t for you.”
Doc remembered to look at his watch finally. “I better go. Ance expected me back a long time ago.”
“Tell him thanks. We be around in a week or so and square up.”
“I was wondering about that. How come if you’ve got so much cash you couldn’t put up your own bail?”
Needles stuck a bare foot inside a Reebok Blacktop and sorted through the pile for its mate. He was grinning. “That’s the thing about cash. One day you got more of it than you got pockets to put it in. Next day it’s just gone. Clean up all this shit, will you, Sylvanus? You could lose a woman in here.”
Chapter 23
“MOM, WHY DOES GRAMPA take his food out of his mouth after he chews it?” asked Sean.
“Shhh! He’ll hear you.”
Which was a total lie. The old man was getting deaf, and he always ran the water in the bathroom sink full blast when he used the toilet, forgetting to turn it off afterward. Doc, seated with the others at the table, could hear him bumping around in there.
“But why does he?”
“Because he doesn’t have enough teeth to chew it thoroughly,” Billie said. “You won’t either, if you don’t brush often enough.”
“I bet he brushed all the time. I bet he brushed them so much he wore them all out and that’s why he can’t chew anything. Right, Doc?”
“Uncle Kevin,” corrected Billie.
“Right, Uncle Kevin?”
“Nice try, kid,” Doc said.
The boy grinned and attacked his corned beef and cabbage. Sean had been opening up lately, and it seemed to his uncle that the boy was losing weight, or at least that his weight was losing ground to his vertical growth. He still fooled around with his video games, but as the weather warmed and the days grew longer he was spending more time outside after school. Coming home from work Doc often found him bouncing a baseball off the wall of the garage and catching it in his glove. He was getting to be a pretty good fielder.
When the toilet flushed, Neal got up and pushed the wheelchair into the bathroom and came out a few minutes later pushing the old man. If Sean was getting trim, it seemed to Doc that the boy’s grandfather had become even more of a shapeless blob since his last visit; his chins overflowed his collar and there were gaps between the buttons of his shirt where flesh showed. The flesh was pale and spotted like old cheese. Doc thought it would have that same consistency, and that if he poked a finger into it the dent would remain. He had trouble connecting this inert pile of useless protoplasm with the robust father of Doc’s youth, working with his back sixty hours a week and spending his weekends carrying heavy car batteries up thirteen steps from the basement to sell them to the local junkyard.
Now, watching his sister-in-law bending over the old man’s plate to cut up his meat—meat he would make an unsuccessful attempt to masticate and then line up on the outer edge of his plate in faded pink pellets—Doc felt a twinge of guilt that he was not particularly saddened by his father’s extremity. Doc remembered being closer to his mother, a small thin woman of frontier ancestry with a flair for painting that she might have made into a profession but for marriage to Keith Miller, the third son of a blue-collar family where the women stayed home and the men went out to work and generally exerted themselves to death before they were fifty. But in the kind of gentle rebellion that Doc imagined was typical of her, it was she who had died when her younger son was barely old enough to appreciate her presence. The small stack of watercolors, seascapes mostly, executed in dreamy pastels by a woman who had lived her entire life in a landlocked state, had gone along with her clothes and shoes and sad collection of costume jewelry, given or sold or thrown away by the sort of neighbors who always did the neighborly thing whenever a neighbor was beyond need of them, while Doc’s father submerged whatever he felt—grief, Doc supposed charitably—in boilermakers and fat women with saffron hair and Rexall perfume in the cement-block bar across from the factory where he worked. Neal had had the paternal faith. He was up to his ears in auto shop class learning a trade his father could identify with while his second son was throwing rocks at the hole in the O on passing B & O boxcars down at the freight yards, preparing his arm for the Lord knew what—smashing department store windows, maybe. There had never been much to say between Doc and the other Millers.
“See you’re hanging around with nigras now.”
Doc looked up from his meal. His father was staring at him, head turned a little to bring his good eye into line.
Neal looked pained. “His roommate’s TV is on all the time. They keep showing those pictures of you and that Lilley woman.”
“It was just a friendly thing,” Doc said.
“You work with ’em sometimes ’cause you got to. Fuck them if you ain’t got nothing better. You sure as hell don’t go out in public with ’em.”
“Grampa said—” Sean was delighted.
“Be quiet,” his moth
er snapped. “Father Miller, we don’t use language like—”
Neal said, “Don’t bother. He won’t remember. Eat your corned beef, Dad. It’s tender.”
The old man pointed his fork at Doc. “You know what you get when you shake hands with the devil? You get your hand burned.”
“That’s original,” Doc said.
“Black people and white people go out together all the time now, Father Miller. A lot of them get married. There’s this couple down at the supermarket—”
“That’s for trash. That’s where high yellows come from. I can get along with nigras until one of ’em gets it into his head he’s as good as white. Shake hands with the devil. Get your hand burned.”
Doc excused himself and went out for a walk.
It was a shirtsleeve day, with a touch of humidity as the sun coasted down and a stillness that suggested the stagnant summer days to come. The puddles left over from Sunday’s rain were in remission and would be gone by morning. Rush hour was over, the tinkle and clatter of flatware and crockery and the smells of cooking came out through the window screens as families sat down to dinner. Doc’s footsteps were the only sound on the street.
A new set came up behind him. His brother touched his arm. They faced each other on the sidewalk.
King of the Corner Page 18
