King of the Corner (3 page)

“Team? We got the Watch, fat lot of good it does us. The Robinettes was broken into last week. They got a VCR and some silver.”

“No, a baseball team. Or softball. When we were kids every place had one.”

“Nothing like that around here.” Neal bent his head over his potatoes.

“I thought maybe they could use a coach. As long as I could pitch, too.”

“Didn’t playing ball get you in enough trouble?” Billie was looking at him.

“I did that all by myself. I didn’t need any help from baseball.”

Neal said, “You won’t have time for it anyway. The dealership’ll keep you busy. We’re short-handed.”

At the end of the meal, Doc offered to help with the dishes, but Billie said that day he was a guest and why didn’t he take a nap, he must be exhausted. He said he wasn’t and asked if he could take a walk. She set down the dishes she was clearing from the table and reached over and touched the back of his wrist. “This is your home, not your cell. You don’t have to ask anyone for permission to do anything.” He smiled then, it felt funny on his face, and said he guessed that would take some getting used to. Neal said he was going to take advantage of having a day off in the middle of the week and find out what was on television while he was at work. When the set warmed up he said, “Who’s this little fucker with the patch on his eye?” Doc went out.

Dearborn was a working town, and in the middle of a working day the streets were empty. Doc had finished growing up five blocks over after his father moved the family north when he went to work at the River Rouge plant, but the names on the mailboxes were unfamiliar and mostly Arab. Chilled in his thin suit coat, he walked briskly to get his blood circulating. A front door opened and a gray-haired man in a plaid bathrobe let a tabby cat out onto the porch. The cat bowed its back, haunches in the air, then sat down and began licking its genitals. The man in the bathrobe stood watching Doc while he passed the house. Behind the man a radio or television was tuned to a baseball game. Doc couldn’t tell who was playing. A color expert who clearly didn’t know much about the sport was explaining why the manager had brought the infield in on the last play. The door closed with a bang, separating Doc from the game forever.

Around the corner was a string of vacant lots overgrown with weeds and littered with Styrofoam food containers and plastic rings from six-packs. City trucks had been using the space to heap the snow they plowed off the street, and there were deposits of salt and orange rust where the heaps had melted. Doc realized with a start that the lots had belonged to a row of empty HUD houses. He had brought a girl to one of them the autumn he turned seventeen. The city had knocked them down to keep children out or to deny shelter to crack operations, and nothing had come along to replace them.

Standing there all alone on the broad sidewalk, he wept silently, fogging his glasses in the damp cold. Not for the houses, and not even for himself or the lost years, but for a neighborhood with so much open space and no baseball team.

B
ALINE’S
J
OHN
D
EERE
S
ALES
& Service on Middlebelt had been owned and operated by the same family for more than forty years. Mickey Baline, the father of the two brothers who now ran the dealership, wandered in every afternoon to sit on a stool behind the parts counter where Doc worked and converse with the older customers who came in, pausing between phrases to spit into a box of sawdust at his feet. He was a bantamweight at sixty-six, bowed in the knees, with a small hard pot rolling over his brass Winchester belt buckle and a big red face that crumpled up like a fist when he chewed whatever it was he chewed; Doc never saw him put anything into his largely toothless mouth, but his jaws were always working. He wore stiff new jeans, a fresh pair every day, a succession of corduroy shirts in solid colors buttoned to the neck, and a baseball cap square over his eyes with the dealership’s full name stitched on the front. On the third day of Doc’s employment, Mickey hoisted himself onto his stool, spat into the box of sawdust, drew the back of a freckled hand across his lips, and said, “So didja fuck any cons when you was in stir?”

Doc was looking through the big catalogue on the shelf under the counter for an item for a telephone customer. “Just myself.”

“Big fella like you, bet you had your pick of all them nice firm assholes.”

“Do we carry intake manifolds for the 1980 diesel tractor?”

“Ask Neal. So which do you like best, getting a blow job or giving one?”

He closed the catalogue. “Thinking of changing sides?”

Mickey cackled—Doc had never actually heard anyone cackle before, outside of Walter Brennan in the movies—spat again, missed the box, and stretched out a leg to rub the spittle into the linoleum with the sole of his shoe. “Just ragging you some, young fella. Everybody gots to stand still for a rag, he wants to work here. I was inside my own self for a year, down in Ohio. The boys don’t know about it. My first wife turned me in for burning down the barn for the insurance. The boys don’t know about her neither. Don’t you tell them.”

“So did you like getting them or giving them?”

“Hell, getting ’em. But I held out longer’n a year plenty of times.”

Doc excused himself and went off to find Neal to ask about intake manifolds. He considered that colorful old men were overrated as company.

His brother was in the large cluttered back room, testing a tire for leaks in a galvanized tub filled with water. He had on gray coveralls stained brown with grease and high-topped shoes with the leather scuffed down to bare steel on the toe of one. When he found where the tire was bubbling, he lifted it out and had it plugged in two seconds. “That’s a back order,” he said, leaning the tire against the wall. “Just add it to the weekly list for the manufacturer.”

When Doc didn’t leave, Neal took a battered Thermos off a shelf supporting a row of John Deere mechanics’ manuals bound in streaked green vinyl, poured coffee into the steel cup, and held it out. Doc took it. His brother emptied a chipped mug of screws and washers, blew dust out of it, and filled it for himself. “Mickey giving you shit?”

“I can live with it. I’m just wondering if he’s my boss.”

“He’s been senile a long time. Jack and Fred made him retire after he traded this old fart buddy of his a brand new combine even up for a 1966 Rambler. Pretend he ain’t there.”

“It’s not just him. I’m not sure I’m cut out for this work. Today I sold my first clevis. I still don’t know what it is.”

“You’ll get the hang of it. Beats stamping license plates, don’t it?”

“Pays better, anyway.” The coffee tasted like crank-case oil. Neal always made his own when Billie, a substitute cook at Fordson High School, was working in the cafeteria. “I’m not bitching about the job. It’s the first one I’ve ever had if you don’t count ball.”

“I don’t. A man can’t play his whole life, ain’t that what Dad said?”

“It’ll be good to see him. What time’s he coming over?”

“We’re picking him up after work. We don’t have to sign him out if we can get him back before ten.”

It sounded like Jackson. “I didn’t know they were that strict.”

“Goddamn home changes hands every six months, and the rules with it. I’d move him someplace better if I could afford it. At least they don’t tie him to his bed like the last place.”

“Jesus, Neal.”

“Yeah, I know.”

The outside door opened and a man came in wearing coveralls like Neal’s over a dirty quilted coat carrying a long bent shaft of metal. He had brown hair curling over his collar and wore dark glasses. “Going ice fishing, Spence?” Neal was looking at the twisted shaft.

“We can straighten it and sharpen it. I don’t give a shit if it lasts a week.” Spence grinned at Doc. “Son of a bitch runs his riding mower over his wife’s rock garden and wants us to give him a new blade.”

Doc indicated the dark glasses. “Is it that bright out?” He and Neal had driven to work that morning in a snow squall.

“Is from this side. I had the cab out all night.”

“All that money we get from the Balines ain’t enough for Spence,” Neal said. “He’s got his own business.”

“Taxi company?”

Spence said, “Fleet of one, and the heater don’t work for shit. But she’s got a hundred and twelve thousand miles on her and she’s good for another hundred. You drive?”

Doc said he did. He was going into the Secretary of State’s office that week to renew his license.

“I’m gone all next week; my brother’s getting married in California. The cab’ll just be sitting there. Like to take her out? On a good night you can pull in a couple of hundred. I’ll split fifty-fifty.”

“I don’t have a chauffeur’s license.”

“Use mine. We don’t look that much different, and the picture stinks anyway. Neal won’t do it He’s got a family.”

“Forget it,” Neal said. “All he needs is to get stopped and they’ll yank his parole.”

“Sorry,” Doc said.

Spence shrugged and carried the bent mower blade over to the vise on the workbench. Doc finished his coffee and handed back the cup. On his way back to the parts counter he multiplied a hundred times seven in his head and wondered what the security deposit was on the average Detroit apartment.

*     *     *

The nursing home in Warren was smaller than expected, a one-story brick building with two long wings lined with windows like a school in a not too prosperous village. Neal and Doc went through the main doors into a narrow carpeted lobby and around a corner without stopping at the door marked OFFICE. A black man nearly Doc’s height in green work pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up was buffing the linoleum in the corridor, the purring of the machine a familiar and oddly comforting sound that reminded Doc of the trusties at work early in the morning. Steel rails lined the corridor on both sides. The doors to some of the rooms stood open. He saw a pair of bare legs in a bed, an old woman in a wheelchair staring at a television screen full of static, a man his own age seated in an odd chair with casters and a fold-down table like a high chair, pulling himself down the corridor with two feet turned at odd angles and talking to himself. Neal paid no attention to any of this.

“Each door’s a different color,” Doc said. “I guess that’s to help them find the way back to their own rooms.”

“Don’t work, though. These people don’t notice nothing.”

Neal stopped so suddenly his brother almost bumped into him. A woman built exactly like Neal in a nurse’s uniform bustled out an open door without slowing and passed both of them carrying a curved plastic pan. The sour urine scent reached Doc’s nostrils as an after-thought.

They entered the room. It was large and airy, painted in pastels and patched with sunlight coming through the glass the length of the opposite wall. Dollops of snow clung to juniper hedges outside. A male cardinal flicked in and out of a feeder on a stand and was gone, a lick of bright red flame in the monochromatic landscape. Neither of the two occupants of the room looked at it.

“Good, we don’t have to help him into the chair,” said Neal.

A huge old man sat slumped in a wheelchair beside the nearer of the room’s two beds. He wore a stiff new shirt buttoned all the way up, tweed pants with a sharp crease, and gray suede shoes without a wrinkle across the insteps to show they’d ever been walked in. His head was round and jowly and hairless, and he had on thick bifocals. The left side of his face looked collapsed, like a fallen-in barn, and he was leaning left in the chair. When he saw Neal he stirred and said something that Doc didn’t catch.

“I brought somebody with me.” Neal grasped Doc’s arm and pushed him forward.

“Hello, Dad,” Doc said.

The old man looked at him a long time. A gray tongue came out, slid along his lips, and withdrew. Doc thought of the cardinal. “Ke’in?”

Kevin put out his hand. After another long time the old man laid his in it. It felt warm and soft like a baby’s. On Doc’s sixteenth birthday his father had arm-wrestled with him to test his manhood; he still remembered the corded muscles, the callus like a leather sole. They broke contact.

Neal stepped behind the chair and grasped the handles. “Time to go, Dad. Billie’s waiting supper.”

They had been watched the whole time by the man in the other bed, lean and white-haired in a striped shirt and dark trousers and slipper-socks, with bright dark eyes and a tolerant smile on his closed lips. Doc raised a hand in farewell. The white-haired man nodded.

“Who’s your roommate?” Doc asked when they were in the hall.

“So’bitch,” his father said.

Neal said, “Old Man Warner. He spits on the other patients.”

Neal had removed a heavy sweater from the sheet-metal wardrobe closet in the room. In the lobby he and Doc helped their father into it and Doc held open one of the wide doors while his brother pushed the old man out into the crisp air. Straining, they lifted him out of the chair into the cab of the pickup, Doc propping him in place with a hand while he climbed in beside him. Neal folded the wheelchair, laid it in the pickup bed, and climbed under the wheel. They rode wedged together all the way to Dearborn. Their father, coming alive now, read aloud the legend on every sign they passed.

At the house Neal parked in the driveway and they pushed the man in the wheelchair up the snow-covered walk to the front door. Billie was ready and held open the door from inside while Neal backed in, jumping the wheels over the threshold while Doc steadied it from the front.

“Sean!” Neal called when they were all inside. “I told you to shovel the walk when you got home from school.”

“I forgot, Papa. I’m sorry.”

The boy, short for his age and pudgy in khaki pants and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle sweatshirt, was standing with his back to a television screen gridded with green and blue lines. The video game control box was in his hands.

“I should have reminded him,” Billie said.

“He’s got a brain. Turn that goddamn thing off and come say hello to your grandpa.”

Suppertimes were hardest on Doc. He couldn’t get used to the food, and Sean, a quiet boy who avoided his parents’ eyes and mostly ignored his uncle, ate as much as any adult, which seemed unnatural and faintly repulsive. Neal didn’t believe much in table conversation, and so the meals generally took place in silence but for the clinking of flatware on crockery and the odd request to pass a dish. Tonight was worse for the old man’s presence, which added an element of forced hospitality, and for his disconcerting habit of removing pieces of meat he couldn’t chew from his mouth and lining them up on the edge of his plate. He gave no indication that he realized he wasn’t still in the home. Doc, who had always been closer to his late mother, was nonetheless shocked by the old man’s deterioration. He seemed to be spreading and blurring into the background.