There was a soda machine by one of the benches and Mel asked me afterwards if I wanted some pop. They had Welch’s grape. So we sat on the bench drinking and burping and watching some of the guys.
“Everybody’s fat these days,” Mel said. “When I was a kid I looked like you.”
“So what do you have to tell me about Astrid?”
“Well, you wanted me to look into it so I looked. You said they knew who his sister was so why couldn’t they find the guy. Rape is a big deal; we take rape seriously. And in this case we had a name and at least one address where the suspect was known to hang out. It didn’t make sense to me either. So I asked around a little. There were complicating factors. For one thing the guy in question had paid to get in—to the club, I mean. It was ten dollars at the door and the bouncer remembered him. He wouldn’t swear to it but he also thought they might have come out together. There’s a camera at the door, which was broken that night, but cameras inside showed Astrid dancing in the vicinity of a well-built African American male in his late twenties. The image quality isn’t good enough for a positive ID. It was pretty dark in there.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It looks like the suspect was probably known to the girl.”
“What does that matter?”
“For one thing it means she hasn’t been telling the truth—at least, not the whole truth. Rape is almost always my word against yours. Where the victim is the only witness, and there’s a good reason to question her credibility, it’s very, very hard to get a conviction. Plus in this case another interpretation suggests itself. That she had a fight with her boyfriend and left the club with some guy she just met and afterwards, maybe when she sobered up, regretted what she did and tried to pin the whole thing on the guy. I’m not saying it wasn’t rape. This guy has previous convictions, including domestic assault, and maybe she changed her mind before they got back to the apartment. Maybe he got a little rough, maybe he even raped her, but if he did, it’s going to be hard to prove because there’s a pretty good case that she lied about the rest.”
“So that’s why they didn’t do anything.”
“That’s why. Are you finished with this?” he said, and took my can and his and threw them away. On the way out he asked me: “What’s your relation to this woman anyway?”
“I picked her up hitchhiking when I drove to Detroit.”
“It all figures. Let me give you some advice you probably don’t want to hear. Everybody lies. This is what you learn from forty-six years as a cop. And victims and witnesses have just as much reason to lie as the people it’s your job to lock up.”
“How is that advice?” I said.
26
Meanwhile, my life went on. The school year was coming to an end and Gloria and I arranged a field trip together. We took a group of ninth graders to visit Franklin Mayer’s farm, which was only about a five-minute drive by rented bus from Kettridge High. Most of the kids had seen the barbwire fence around it. There were security issues early on, people stealing equipment and fertilizer, and Franklin had instituted an ID system. But I wanted these local kids to get a look at what was happening on the other side of the barbwire.
It rained in the morning but cleared up enough for us to get out on the fields after lunch. A lot of the people who worked the farm came for just a few days or maybe a few weeks, and Franklin didn’t expect them to buy their own clothes. There was a changing room with lockers full of gear. So the kids got to put on rubber boots and wade out on the soft earth.
Franklin took us around. I liked this guy, but he wasn’t somebody you had to listen to. He talked a lot, his big good-looking red face looked a little sunburned, too, and he wasn’t at all shy leading forty homegrown Detroiters through what used to be one of their neighborhoods. We started out with the cucumber patch and the kids put down a few seeds. “Man, it smells like shit here,” one of them said, and Franklin said, “It smells like three different kinds of shit.”
“I never met a white farmer before.”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought it was all like Mexicans.”
“It’s interesting you should say that,” Franklin said, “because one of my uncles, one of my great-uncles, was an attaché to Heinrich von Eckardt. You know von Eckardt? He was the German ambassador to Mexico in 1917, the one who received the Zimmermann Telegram. They wanted to get Mexico on board in case America entered the war, which of course we did.”
This is how he talked, and most of the kids got a kick out of him.
He pointed out squash beds and potato beds, tomato plants, rhubarb patches, and zucchini vines strung up on posts and wires. There were also young peach and apple orchards; the trees looked like twigs stuck in the ground. He walked us along the side of wide grain fields and stopped to have a word with a couple of guys. “If any of you wants a summer job,” Franklin said, “talk to Pete.”
Pete was Pete Chaney, a former high school English teacher, as it happens. I knew him slightly; he was a recovering alcoholic and had two teenage girls back in Billings. His wife still worked at the Gazette and couldn’t decide whether or not to divorce him.
There were animals, too, a handful of cows, three pigs, chickens in a coop, even a horse named Toto, which Franklin kept for no other reason than that he liked to ride it around the farm. Just at the end he let us dig up a few early potatoes, which were still very small, to show us what they looked like.
“I ain’t eating nothing I have to dig out of the dirt.”
“Where do you think French fries come from?” Franklin said.
“McDonald’s.”
The kids had a good time but Gloria didn’t seem comfortable or happy. “Okay, I get it, it’s very funny, ha-ha,” she said to me at one point.
“What’s wrong?”
“He’s hamming it up.”
“That’s just what he’s like,” I said.
We could hear the traffic on I-94 over our heads, competing against the noise of birds, grackles and jays on some of the trees and crows in the fields. The whole visit took two hours; most of what we ended up doing was crowd control. Afterwards the kids changed out of their muddy clothes and washed their hands. There was a shack next to the changing room where you could buy whatever was in season, lettuces and radishes, etc. Just as we were leaving the young guy behind the counter accused some girl of stealing asparagus. He said, “Hey, where you going with that,” and Gloria grabbed her and spun her around.
“I didn’t do anything,” the girl said, but we opened her handbag and found about half a dozen stalks.
“The man said I could. I said what’s that and he said, take some.”
“I didn’t tell her that.” He had a paper-white foreign-looking face; his accent sounded flavored by the movies.
But the girl meant Franklin, who came out of the bathroom drying his hands and said, “It’s true.”
“Why you jump on me like that, Miss Lambert,” the girl said. Her name was Mabelle Johnson. She was one of these bony-butted black girls and wore her hair real tight on her head, in pigtails. “You know me better than that.”
On the bus ride home Gloria apologized to her, but she also said, “I don’t care who said what. You make sure the people who need to see what you’re doing are seeing what you’re doing. That’s just common sense.” But Mabelle just pushed up her lip and turned her shoulder. She was one of my kids, an okay kid, but a talker in class, who was hard to shut up because maybe 20 percent of the time she had something to say.
Gloria seemed disproportionately upset by the whole thing. We drove back to my place after school, in two cars, and did a little shopping together. Then I cooked while she graded papers.
“You’re a little quiet,” I said to her over supper.
“I didn’t have fun today. Why didn’t I have fun? I always used to think I was having fun.”
“It’s a field trip. The teacher isn’t supposed to have fun.”
“No, but I like field trips
. That’s not it.”
“You want to tell me what is?”
She shook her head.
Later that week we talked about it again. She stayed over on Friday night and sometimes when I pushed a little hard in bed she got out of it by starting emotional conversations. We went to bed early but then kind of wrestled for a bit and gave up. But I was too frustrated to sleep, and then my restlessness woke her and we talked. It was around one in the morning.
My bedroom was on the top floor. Robert James made a big deal about getting little things to work, like neighborhood street lamps, and the light from the street came in through my curtains, bright enough I could see her dark face. But her expression was hard to read. Her eyes looked very large and white.
We said all kinds of things to each other. One of the things I remember is that she said, “I don’t always know who I am. Isn’t that weird?”
“When do you know who you are?”
“When I’m not with you.”
But we got to sleep eventually and had a nice weekend together.
I DECIDED FOR A COUPLE of reasons to call Astrid. What Mel Hauser had said kept worrying me. It seemed that whenever I had sexual relations with people I started to get paranoid thoughts, I started to think I didn’t know these people I was sharing my bed with at all. I mean, that’s basically what Gloria had told me, that I didn’t understand her. But in this case I had third-party information that Astrid had lied and lied in a kind of spooky way. So I phoned her up and we arranged to meet after work at that bar by the train station. The bar was her idea.
It turned out to be a bad day at school. We had one week of class left, the exams were done, everybody seemed to be feeling their oats. It didn’t help that the air-conditioning broke down. Even with the windows open I could feel my shirt sticking to me and unsticking. When a breeze blew in it was like a little taste of vacation.
Since we were just killing time, I taught a few classes on colonial America—something I actually know about. This was a mistake; the kids didn’t care and I got annoyed.
One of the interesting things about the early colonies, I told them, which you don’t get much of a sense of, say, from The Scarlet Letter, is that even though the Pilgrims would probably be considered religious fundamentalists by today’s standards, they actually had to make quite a few concessions to civil liberties. They just didn’t have enough people, certainly after the first couple of winters, to keep up the old social structures.
Mabelle Johnson said, “Explain to me why I care.” She had been acting up consistently since the visit to the farm.
“Well, for example, unmarried women had the right to own property.”
“You mean ’cause I’m like an unmarried woman? What about black women? How much property did black women own?”
“I don’t know. The first blacks came to Virginia in 1619, as indentured servants. Some of them eventually owned land, but I don’t know about women. Some of them owned slaves.”
“You made that up.”
“Look,” I said. “The line between servant and slave wasn’t always easy to draw, especially at the beginning. People talked about servants in terms of money, but they also had contracts, which could be worked out.”
“What do you mean, money?”
“I mean they left each other servants in their wills. They traded servants, they put a value on them.”
“Like how much?”
“It varied. But about twenty, twenty-five pounds.”
“How much is that?”
“In today’s money?”
“In dollars.”
“That’s hard to say, but it’s a reasonable amount of money.”
“For a black man? I’m a tell Miss Lambert you said that.”
“That’s not what I meant. We’re talking about white servants, too.”
“Why don’t you say what you mean?”
And so on. I didn’t know what to do about her; there was nothing I could do. But I felt angry for the rest of the day and didn’t get to see Gloria after school, except for three minutes in the parking lot. I told her I was going to meet an old friend for a drink.
ASTRID WAS LATE AND I sat at the bar long enough to finish a beer. Just as well, I thought, since I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say to her. But then she came in and I couldn’t believe how nervous I felt—my heart beat unpleasantly.
She wore jeans and cowboy boots, which was like her uniform. In the air-conditioned bar her pale skin quickly goose-pimpled. “You called me,” she said.
“I wanted to ask you something. A friend of mine’s a cop, and I asked him to look into what happened to you. He told me something I wanted to ask you about.”
“I should warn you, I’m not interested in any of that anymore. I’ve talked about it so much it doesn’t feel real. And anyway, it wasn’t important. You only have to open your eyes to see that what’s happening all around you is so much worse.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everything in my art was about me. But this is boring and stupid. So I started talking to other people. It’s amazing, if you ask people things they tell you.”
We ordered bar food, but I wasn’t very hungry, I didn’t eat much. The hamburgers came and she got her fingers dirty with ketchup. Even though she rubbed her hands on paper napkins, I could see the marks they made on her white T-shirt. I picked at the fries and drank another beer. One of the things we talked about was Tyler Waites. I said I knew Sandy Brinkman, the guy whose phone got stolen; Astrid seemed interested. Afterwards, she invited me back to her place—she wanted to show me what she was working on.
There was an artists’ commune near the train station, a short row of houses that had been saved from demolition and turned into studios. People lived there, too, for a few months at a time. It was somewhere to find your feet. When a space came up, Astrid jumped at the chance. It’s more like what she was used to in Berlin, she said. Everybody shared a kitchen; you cooked together. It didn’t matter what your apartment was like. You lived for seeing friends.
It was a two-minute walk to her house, but we didn’t go to her room at first. She took me to the studio, which was in another building. I had to put up with being introduced to other people, a Belgian PhD student, who was interested in modern ruins, and a black guy from East London. They were making pakoras in the kitchen. The black guy did most of the cooking. He wore high-tops, army pants and a Mookie Blaylock jersey under his apron. I could see the name when he turned around.
“What do you do?” I said.
He recorded house parties, mostly audio recordings. Basically, he was interested in the music being played, but he also took photographs. On Friday nights he just drove around the city.
I felt like the guy who hangs around the girl and was glad when she took me upstairs. Her studio was pretty basic; it had some video equipment and a cheap two-seater couch. Astrid immediately opened both windows—the whole house smelled of frying oil. Then we sat down and watched one of her films.
“Do you want something to drink?” she said, hitting the pause button. “All I have is Jack Daniel’s.”
So she poured some into coffee mugs and started the film again. The first thing I saw was a framing shot of a playground basketball court. There was a game going on and music in the background, but you couldn’t tell if the music came from the park. Then it got louder and too loud, somebody rapped angrily—
All of my brothers live by the trigger
But nobody care so long as nigger kill nigger
—and the screen suddenly turned into a black talking face with a white wall behind it. The music stopped and you could hear him:
—I tell you something happened the other day. I went down to the park to play a little ball. Corey got next, so I said to him, can I run with you, Corey? And he’s like, you come to play? Because this little punk’s been running his mouth. I’m fixing to shut him up. And D’Andre hears him, and he’s like, yeah, shut this, and knocks down a three. Game
over. You know, everybody having a good time, just talking a little shit. So we get in the game and they start going at it. Pushing and shoving. Bitching and moaning. A lot of ticky-tack calls. So I say, come on, fellas, let’s play the game, I came here to play basketball. We usually run to twenty-one, twos and threes, winner stays. And after a while it’s like nineteen up. Then D’Andre takes it to the hole, and puts up some weak shit, and I slap that shit away, and D’Andre’s like, and one. Which pisses me off now. So I say, you gotta make the bucket. It can’t be and one if you don’t make the fucking shot, and Corey’s like, man, he didn’t foul you, bitch, and everybody saying, honor the call, honor the call, and D’Andre’s like, ball up. He’s one of these skinny hyped-up guys who got like twice as big in two months, and has to wear a T-shirt all the time to cover his back. So he takes the ball out and jacks up a three, which bangs off the rim, and Corey says, ball don’t lie. Ball don’t lie. And D’Andre goes over to the benches, like he’s getting a drink. So I turn my back and run down court. And then I hear everybody saying, hey, hey, hey, watch out, and Corey’s lying on the ground. Fuck me. And D’Andre’s got a knife in his hand and is jumping up and down, and everybody says, get the fuck out of here, and he takes off.
—So what did you do?
—Man, I took off, too. But this is what I’m saying. Black man isn’t being killed by Tyler Waites, not in this city, not in Detroit. Black man being killed by another black man.
—So why didn’t you stay to help your friend?
—If the cops come, everybody guilty.
The other voice was Astrid’s. She used subtitles for the man’s speech but not her own, which annoyed me. And then the music came back and the screen went dark. The words A Conversation about Race started moving across it.
“I’m not interested in this kind of thing,” I said. “It’s banal. The only interesting thing is ordinary life. The rest is boring.”
“The people I talk to, for them, this is ordinary life.”
“I mean people living well, how to live well, that’s the question.”
“You don’t want to see the rest?”
You Don't Have to Live Like This Page 23
