You Don't Have to Live Like This

by Benjamin Markovits

  “How’s Cris?” I said.

  “She’s fine, we’re doing fine. And Jimmy’s great, he’s starting to sit up, he’s starting to eat solid food. That’s just my first chapter, that’s the premise. I want to talk about the new economy, too. Dads stuck at home with the kids, because they got laid off. Moms working.”

  At two o’clock I asked the bartender to switch one of the TV stations over to the local news. Eventually he found what I was looking for—Larry Oh’s press conference.

  He sat behind a table in some windowless room, with microphones bunched up against his face. You could see the effect of his white genes. His mother was a Catholic-school girl, when there were still Catholic girls’ schools in Detroit. I remembered this much from the newspaper article. Oh had one of those ageless Asian faces, but a little tired-looking, a little crumpled around the eyes and mouth. I had to stand up and walk over to the TV set to hear him.

  Dwayne Meacher came out of his coma yesterday morning, around three a.m. He’s weak, but he’s talking, Oh said. The EEG shows no sign of brain damage. In the light of which, they had decided not to press charges against Tyler Waites.

  “What about charges against Meacher?” a reporter asked.

  “We have no plans of pressing charges against Mr. Meacher.”

  “Okay,” I told the bartender. “You can switch it back.”

  “Cris is basically fine,” Tony said, when I sat down again. “She identifies totally with the kids, she’s a great mother, I love to watch her with the boys. We used to fight about Michael. How long are you going to nurse him for? If he can spell breast, he’s too old. But Jimmy’s made a lot of that easier.”

  “I’m glad you said that. I didn’t always know where to look.”

  “I could have told you where to look.”

  Tony paid for lunch. Both of us needed to take a leak. On the way out I asked him if he was okay to drive.

  “Do you want to drive?”

  “I had as much as you.”

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  There’s nobody on the streets in Detroit anyway. About fifteen minutes later, we pulled up outside the gates of Robert’s house; the workmen had gone. By this point it was maybe three o’clock in the afternoon. The sun had burned the clouds away, but the sky looked hazy, not quite blue. Tony had misjudged the angle, so I got out to tap in the entry code. With the bushes blooming and the grass recently cut, the air smelled almost tropical.

  They must have changed the code. We couldn’t get in and Tony backed up to park in the road.

  I kept ringing and ringing the bell by the intercom. “Maybe it’s broken,” Tony said, but eventually Robert himself buzzed us in. Then he opened the door for us and stood in the doorway.

  “I don’t know where anyone is,” he said. “Probably the garden.”

  So we went through the air-conditioned house, and into the kitchen, and out into the garden again. I was sweating already, just from the contrasts. Peggy lay on a blanket in the grass, trying to read on one elbow, under a hat.

  “Where are the kids?” Tony said.

  “Fran’s just getting Ethan to sleep. He refuses to nap unless you put him in the stroller.”

  “Did Michael go with them?” he asked, and Peggy sat up.

  “I think so.”

  “Which way do they usually go?”

  Peggy had taken off her shirt. She was wearing a swimsuit top, but she put her shirt on again and stood up. “I’ll go with you,” she said, buttoning it.

  “You sure he’s not in the house?”

  “I don’t know.”

  But he wasn’t in the house, and it took us half an hour in the car to track down Fran. Her phone was dead, and she had stopped on Charlevoix at an ice cream parlor that had just opened up. We saw her pushing the stroller out again; Ethan was still asleep. Peggy and I got out. Tony was driving. Peggy said, “Where’s Michael?”

  “I thought he was with you.”

  “Why would he be with me?”

  Fran thought for a minute and said, “The last time I saw him he was watching TV in the kitchen. You were talking on the phone.”

  “You’re right, that was me,” she said.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Just take him home.”

  We got in the car and Peggy told Tony, “It was probably my fault. She doesn’t know where he is. The last time anybody saw him was in the kitchen.”

  “He can’t have gone far,” I said.

  So we drove back to the house, and Peggy ran in and started calling for Robert. Tony said to me, “I don’t feel well, I shouldn’t have drunk. I need to clear my head. I need some water.” Peggy got the number of the repair guys, but it was a company number, and she had to wait on the phone to get through to a human being. So we looked around the house again; it was a big house. I went into the garden and ran around it once, from back to front, then walked back the other way, already out of breath. My eyes itched, I couldn’t stop rubbing them, but I didn’t find anything except his soccer ball, under a bush.

  30

  When I came back in everybody was in the kitchen, Robert and Tony and Fran and Peggy. Mrs. Rodriguez, the cook, was there, too, preparing supper. It was cool in the kitchen, the air tasted nice and artificial, I could breathe again. Fran said into the telephone, “Give me a fucking break. I just want a phone number. We’re looking for a kid.” Apparently the human being was reluctant to give out personal information, and Robert took the phone away and walked out of the room with it. I heard him say, “Nobody’s angry with you, she’s upset.”

  I said to Mrs. Rodriguez, “When did you get here?”

  “About a half hour ago. I didn’t see the boy. Maybe I left the gate open, I don’t know. Sometimes I park in the driveway to bring something in, but I don’t leave the car there, I park in the road. Today I had a little shopping, so that’s what I did.”

  “He was missing already, a half hour ago,” Tony told her. “We went out looking for him. It wasn’t you.”

  Robert came in. “She’s going to call back. She doesn’t know their private numbers. The next thing we do is call the police. Peggy, give me your cell. I don’t want to use the house line.”

  “I can’t sit here,” Tony said. “I can’t just sit here.”

  “Do you want me to just drive around with you?”

  “Okay.” He gave me the keys. “You drive. I’ll look.”

  We went outside to the car. It was like walking into a bathroom where the shower’s been left on. My hay fever came back, my throat ached, my nose started running. The only thing I had to blow it with was a balled-up sheet of toilet paper. For the rest of the afternoon I had this uncomfortable drip.

  Tony kept the windows rolled down. We crawled around the neighborhood. It all looked terrific, the big houses, the old trees, the front gardens, it looked like a million bucks. But we didn’t see anybody to talk to.

  “Look,” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen to him. He went outside and got lost, that’s all. There aren’t even any cars around.” Later I said, “Maybe we should take both cars. That way we can cover more ground.”

  “I don’t want to be alone right now,” Tony said. “Okay, all right.”

  So we drove back to my place, which wasn’t far. Outside the house I pulled up and left the keys in the car and got out, and Tony got out, to switch sides. Nolan was standing on the porch.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “Not now.”

  “I want to talk to you now,” he said.

  “Tell him to fuck off,” Tony said, and got in his car.

  My car was parked in the drive, with the driver’s side facing the porch. Nolan had a big blue medical bandage on the side of his neck and face. The whites of his eyes looked bloody, his nose was scratched up.

  “Where have you come from, the hospital?”

  “I got the kid.”

  “What do you mean, you got him?”r />
  “I mean I got him, I took him.”

  I called out to Tony, “It’s all right, he found Michael.”

  “I didn’t find him, I took him. I got him.”

  “Well, where is he?”

  “I want to talk to Robert James. I want you to call him for me.”

  Tony came out of the car, and it went from there. Eventually I managed to get them in the house—they were shouting at each other on the porch, like a couple of drunks, you could hear them up and down the block. But there was nobody around. I had a hangover coming on, a faint one, starting from the inside of my eye sockets, by the bridge of the nose. I felt thirsty and light-headed, almost dizzy, but Nolan looked excited, too, he didn’t make sense. First I pulled Tony inside and up the stairs and then Nolan followed.

  “Let’s just sit down and get something to drink. It’s too hot outside. I don’t understand what’s going on.”

  But nobody sat down. “I want to talk to Robert James,” Nolan said.

  “Where the fuck is my son?”

  “What do you want to talk to him about?”

  “He’s got to understand what this is about. We’re not fucking around here. He can buy up our neighborhoods and there’s nothing I can do about it. But this is due process, this is the law.”

  “What’s Michael got to do with it?”

  “I’m just making him sweat a little. He needs to understand what political pressure is. This is political pressure.”

  “You’re not listening. I need to know where he is.”

  “He’s fine. He’s not the one you should be worried about here.”

  “Tell me where my fucking son is, you fucking—”

  “Tony, shut up for a second. Let’s everybody calm down. I just want to understand what’s going on here.”

  Afterwards it occurred to me that maybe Nolan thought Michael was Robert’s kid, maybe that’s why he took him, in protest, when he wandered into the street. I don’t know if Nolan ever met Michael. When Clarence came by our house, his grandmother picked him up. But even Nolan must have realized his mistake. At one point, Tony said to me, “This is stupid. Give me your phone. I’m calling the police.”

  “The fuck you are,” Nolan said and took the phone away, grabbing it out of my hand—he had big hands. Suddenly it was like this very obvious fact about all of us, which nobody ever mentions, had just been mentioned. He wasn’t just stronger than me but maybe two or three or four times stronger. Tony had left his cell in the car but then Nolan stood up to block the door, and I remember thinking, he’s scared, too, Nolan’s a big guy and Tony is scared. “Haven’t you got a gun, Marny?” he said. “Go get your fucking gun.”

  “That’s right, Annie. Get your gun.”

  “Go to hell, Nolan.”

  “Just get it,” Tony said.

  So I went upstairs, which I was glad to do anyway, to get away. I had two guns, the Remington from Walmart, which I kept under the bed, and Mel’s Smith & Wesson, a handgun, standard police issue. That lived in my sock drawer. The shotgun was plainly ridiculous, but then the Smith & Wesson seemed ridiculous, too, and I sat on my bed fighting a strong sense of unreality. I felt like I had to fight the unreality if I was going to get back to some kind of normal state of affairs, because if I didn’t get back to normal, bad things might happen, things outside the human range I was accustomed to, which I had read about but which I had mostly preserved myself from.

  The best way I can put this feeling is this. Once, driving through South Carolina with a couple of college friends, on the way back from Spring Break, we struck a rock in the road and popped a tire, and had to pull across the lanes of traffic to the hard shoulder. It was about one in the morning. The highway wasn’t particularly busy, there were a lot of trucks, but the noise they made was terrific—more than terrific, frightening—as soon as you stepped out of the car. When you’re in the car your own noise drowns much of the traffic sound, but as soon as you stop, as soon as you stand aside to observe it, you hear and feel the violence of the machinery passing by. And bad things can happen to you. Someone might run into you, someone might pull over and rob you. Until you get back in the car, on the road, in the traffic again, you feel helpless, and I sat on the bed until I heard Tony calling out to me so I went downstairs.

  They were wrestling and punching each other on the floor, punching but not really hitting. They were both worn out. Nolan was almost on top, on his knees, and Tony lay on his back trying to hit him. “Get this— Get him off me,” Tony said, but I just stood there, watching. Both of these guys were my friends, I didn’t know what to do. Tony kept clawing at Nolan, openhanded, and then he caught him in the face and Nolan’s bandage kind of dragged away. All his human mess, the inside stuff, started leaking out.

  “Fuck me,” Tony said. “You’re fucking gross.” He rolled away and pulled himself up by the sofa cushions. Nolan tried to stand up and got as far as his elbows, but Tony started kicking him, in the shoulder area. Not hard, but still, kicking. Nolan kept trying to get up but then he fell back again and hit his head on the floor; it kind of bounced. “What have you done with my kid?” Tony said. “Where is he?”

  But Nolan was out cold, and I had to pull Tony off him.

  “What were you doing up there?” he said. “Taking a nap?”

  “I was trying to work out what to do.”

  “Well, you didn’t do shit.”

  He picked up the phone, which was lying on the floor, and started dialing. There were faint handprints on his shirt, one of those short-sleeved collared shirts you wear to go bowling, red with a black stripe down one side. It said Pearson’s Auto Parts in white italics, and then, underneath, Mayflower Lanes and Summer League 2006. The color of the shirt hid most of the blood.

  “Who are you calling?” I said.

  “Who do you think, the cops.” But this took a while—he stood there giving answers. Yes, no, his name, his son’s name. What’s the address, he wanted to know, I don’t know the address. Everything pissed him off. He turned to me, waiting; everything distressed him.

  “Tell them to send an ambulance.”

  “Send an ambulance,” he said and hung up. “Where does he live?”

  “He lives with his mom. The house on the corner.”

  “Maybe she’s got Michael. What are you doing?”

  “Waiting here till everybody comes.”

  Tony took off. He had to step around Nolan, I heard him running down the stairs, and then I heard the front door bang. After a minute the door clicked open again and I heard him calling, “Marny, Marny!”

  He was standing at the foot of the stairs, almost in tears. I went down and he said, “Which corner.”

  So I showed him. I didn’t mean to go all the way, but he was walking fast and wouldn’t stop. It was about four o’clock, the real baking point of the day. School was out, and we didn’t see anybody. When I pointed out the house, he started running and then I ran after him and caught him on the steps and rang the bell.

  Eventually Mrs. Smith waded into the hall. She opened the front door and looked at us through the screen. “I suppose you come to collect him.”

  We both had to catch our breaths, but I said, “Is Michael here?”

  “They’re in the garden, playing with the hose. Anything to cool down, it’s one of those days. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No, that’s fine,” Tony said.

  “Would you like some lemonade? We’ve been making lemonade from scratch. It might be a little sour. They used a lot of lemons.”

  “I just want to see my son.”

  “He’s been fine, he’s been a good boy.”

  Tony walked through the house and into the kitchen and out the back, which had a screen door, too, that clappered behind him. Mrs. Smith poured a glass of lemonade into one of those mottled translucent plastic cups, and gave it to me. We could see the garden through the back door. Clarence had the hose in his hand, and pointed it in the air, spraying the water upwards with his t
humb. It fell down in a soft arch. Michael waited and then ran through the mist, squealing. Tony tried to pick him up but he wriggled out of his father’s arms. We couldn’t hear what Michael said but Tony put him down and Michael ran through the mist again.

  “Those two just found each other, it’s a beautiful thing.”