King of the Corner (9 page)

At the door he said, “Better put on a fresh pot, Mrs. W. That stuff they serve at County would strip varnish.”

They got into the Coachmen. “Nice couple,” Ance said. “Too bad they’re going to lose the place.”

“What makes you so sure they will?” Doc leaned out the open driver’s door as he backed into the street.

“Desk sergeant I talked to in Pontiac said the kid was a stone puke. Everyone was a motherfucker, including his parents. He’ll skip, Ozzie and Harriet will lose their house, and I’ll be stuck with another fucking piece of Detroit real estate I couldn’t give away if I threw in a case of Stroh’s. Maybe the guy on TV is right. I should go in for the exciting life of a bartender.”

“I didn’t believe you when you told me how much you pay in taxes. I guess it’s true.”

“Sure it’s true. I pay about the same amount to a firm of accountants to keep from paying twice as much to the government. Which come to think of it if I went ahead and paid, I wouldn’t be spending it on accountants. I’m going to have to give this some thought. I may have stumbled on to something here.”

He rolled down his window, letting in a stream of sweet cool air; the day was getting nicer by the minute. “Listen, I’m not the guy in the stovepipe hat who ties the girl to the railroad tracks. That’s the kid. I paid forty-eight thousand for this rig outright, but I had cosigners: Dr. Spock and Tim Leary and Asshole Abbie Hoffman and the Beatles and my late great client Wilson McCoy, may he rot in hell with his head up his sphincter. They built this generation from the ground up with that drug counterculture-civil disobedience horseshit. Without it I’d be down to my last sodomite.”

“I heard on the radio Alcina Lilley may speak at McCoy’s funeral.”

“Maybe. The M-and-M’s been trying to tie themselves to her halo for years, but she hasn’t said boo to them yet. She’d rather go on as a symbol of the civil rights movement without ever doing anything but be Mahomet’s widow. But I’m not knocking it, that’s her angle. Mine’s bankrolling worried parents of little assholes and shoveling the shit with a bucket-loader.”

“The police think Starkweather Hall may show up.”

“If they thought that they sure as hell wouldn’t say it on the radio. Maybe they think he’ll take the dare. That big an asshole he isn’t. That power-to-the-brothers fist-in-the-air crap is an angle, too.” Ance bared his teeth at the windshield. “I copped a peek once at his jacket down at the Federal Building. Drug Enforcement thinks he took his name from Charles Starkweather, that crazy-ass killer they fried in Nebraska thirty years back. It’s the name of the chapel at Eastern Michigan University. He must’ve read it somewhere. He reads more than the entire population of Watts. And they’re treating him like some little ghetto snotnose can’t write his own name in the snow on Antietam.”

“Sounds like he trusted you.”

“Up to a point. I don’t go get the pry bar out when they decide to clam. You never hear about a bail bondsman being found all trussed up like a pullet and shot full of holes in the trunk of his car.”

“Where to now, your bank?”

“Nah, let the little scroat scratch his balls a couple more hours. We’ll spring him just before feeding time. He’ll stay home long enough to eat anyway. Let’s go to the State Farm office, let the adjuster look at that window Taber busted.” Ance fired a cigarette off the dashboard lighter and let the slipstream pull the smoke out the window.

N
EAL WASN’T AROUND WHEN
Doc walked home from the bus stop at sundown. Billie said he’d called to say he was staying late because John Deere had sold a customer a new backhoe without oil seals and the Baline brothers had promised the customer they’d have them installed before morning.

“How was your first day?” She was stirring onions and peppers in a skillet on the stove, taking grease spatters directly in her face without flinching. The spicy aroma pricked Doc’s nostrils.

“Interesting.”

“What did you do?”

I almost ran over a fellow employee and watched a couple trade their home for their delinquent son.
“Not much. Just drove the boss around town.”

“As long as it’s honest.”

“Not like baseball, huh?”

“We won’t get into that.” She took the skillet off the burner and scraped the contents into a steel bowl full of steaming ground beef.

“Where’s Sean?”

“In the living room, where else?”

“We won’t get into that either,” he said.

She turned off the burner and used a big spoon to stir the mixture in the bowl. “Supper’s in about a half-hour.”

“What are you making?”

“Stuffed peppers. Hope you like them. Sean and I love them but we can only have them when Neal’s not here. He says they’re too spicy for his stomach.”

He went into the living room. Sean was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV set, cold-cocking dragons and monsters by proxy. The green-and-blue glow of the screen was the room’s only illumination. Doc switched on a lamp and sat in his brother’s chair, an ivory-colored recliner worn shiny on the arms, and watched the boy, not the game. Sean was developing a roll of fat at the base of his neck.

The game ended. The boy climbed onto his knees, ejected the cassette from the machine on the bottom of the TV cart, and began sorting through the half-dozen or so cassettes he had stacked on the carpet. So far he hadn’t acknowledged his uncle’s presence.

“How’s school?” Doc asked.

Great opening. Sean lifted and dropped his shoulders without looking up from the cassettes. “Okay.”

“I guess they’ve got you using a computer by now.”

He shrugged again and fed one of the tapes into the machine.

“Take gym?”

“Uh-huh.” He picked up the controls.

Doc wondered if he should leave the chair and sit on the floor next to the boy. He decided he shouldn’t. Some of his father’s friends had done that with him, pretending to be interested in a child’s affairs, when he was trying to watch Dick Van Dyke or something, and he had seriously resented the invasion. They had all smelled of Old Spice and Carling Black Label. “So do you, like, play games or exercise or what?”

No answer. A little figure with a bulbous head moved along the screen with the jerky gait of the stickmen Doc used to draw on the corners of the pages in arithmetic books and animate by flipping the pages rapidly. The object seemed to be to destroy as many obstacles as possible by butting them with the little guy’s big head. Doc wondered if the game’s designers had scored as poorly in arithmetic as he had.

“Ever play baseball?”

Sean took out a woolly mammoth. “Soccer,” he said. “Some basketball.”

“Which do you like better?”

“I don’t play much. Mr. Anderson says the boys that don’t want to can play shuffleboard.”

Gym class hadn’t changed. The kids on shuffleboard when Doc was in school mostly wore glasses with the waistband of their shorts hiked up under their armpits.

“When I was eight I played baseball all the time, couldn’t keep me off the field. You play?”

“Sure I played.”

“How many times?” He heard himself on that one, the badgering tone. Cool it.

Sean was quiet. The little guy on the screen was taking an awful walloping from a gorilla, or maybe it was a grizzly bear. He wasn’t getting much help from the living room. When the boy spoke, Doc could detect the sudden inspiration. “Fifteen times.”

It must have seemed like a lot to him. The actual number was probably closer to four or five. Neal’s son would be that last boy left over after both captains had chosen up sides, the one the gym teacher had to assign to a team. Doc, who was usually the first pick when he wasn’t captain himself, had always found it excruciating to watch. “Would you like to play with me Saturday?”

The gorilla/bear bit the dust finally. On its back it looked like Aurelio Lopez, old
Señor
Smoke. “You need more than two to play baseball.”

“Your dad and I used to play all the time. We lived in the country, players were hard to find. You do a lot of running after the ball is all. It’s good practice.”

“The yard’s too small. Mama says I shouldn’t run into the street.”

“There’s a big empty lot up on the corner.”

“Mama says stay away from there. People sell dope and stuff.”

“It’ll be broad daylight and I’ll be with you. We’ll clear it with her first, though. So do we have a date?”

The little guy brained his last adversary and captured the princess. The screen went black. “I guess so.”

Billie came to the living room doorway, mopping her hands on her apron. “Kevin, I almost forgot. You had a phone call, a Mr. Battle. He wants you to call him back. The number’s on the desk.”

He got up and went to the shallow glazed rolltop where Neal paid his bills. The telephone was there and Doc dialed the number written on a pad with a cartoon of Ziggy in one corner wallowing in a one-size-fits-all sweatshirt. When Sergeant Battle answered Doc identified himself.

“Thanks for getting back to me. Can you come downtown tomorrow? I’ve got some more questions.”

“I told you everything I know about McCoy.”

“This isn’t about McCoy. It’ll only take a few minutes.”

“I’m working tomorrow.”

“You’re in Dearborn, right?” Battle said. “It’s right on my way to work. I could stop by before you leave.”

He turned his back to the kitchen. Sean was sorting through his tapes. “No, I don’t want to scare my brother and sister-in-law with a visit from the police. Can we meet somewhere?”

“Your call.”

He thought about restaurants. He didn’t know any except the Acropolis, and Greektown was out of his way. “I’ll meet you on the corner. There’s a vacant lot.” He named the streets. “Seven o’clock okay? I have to leave for work at seven-thirty.”

“You’ll make it.” The connection broke.

On TV, while the tape Sean had just played was rewinding, a news show—Doc thought it was
48 Hours
—was documenting the prostitution in a city that looked like Detroit but could have been any one of a dozen population centers currently going to hell: The camera, mounted on a truck or something, cruised down a broad avenue lined with women, mostly black, in halter tops and leather jackets and short skirts or skintight Day-Glo pants and spike heels watching the traffic go by. Some of them stood on the edge of the curb and leaned down to speak through open windows to drivers stopped at red lights. Doc still had an erection ten minutes later when Billie announced supper. He approached the table carrying in front of him the copy of the
Detroit News
he’d been reading in Neal’s chair.

That erection had been coming since he’d read the WE EMPLOY ONLY AMERICAN MASSEUSES sign on the health spa that shared Maynard Ance’s building. It didn’t go away until he’d finished one stuffed pepper and started on a second. If he didn’t do something about it soon …

“Split open,” Billie said.

Doc looked up from his plate. She was dissecting her meal with her fork. The expression on her worn face was clinical. “Sorry?”

“I let the peppers boil too long. They get soft and split open when you try to stuff them.”

“They’re delicious.” The bite he took then was the first he’d actually tasted. He was getting used to his sister-in-law’s cooking, so much more pungent than what he’d been eating for seven years. Nevertheless he was losing weight, due to the nightly walks and his own metabolism. In another week he’d be his lanky self again. “Is the city going to do anything with that property on the corner?”

“Those empty lots? I don’t think that’s the city’s responsibility. They were part of a federal housing project that never got off the ground. Neal says if John Deere was run like the government, farmers would still be plowing with horses.”

“I thought Sean and I would go there Saturday. Play a little ball.”

The skin around her nostrils whitened. “Did you talk to Neal about it?”

“No, I just got the idea tonight. Sean wants to do it. Right, Sean?”

The boy poked at a lump of ground beef. “Yeah.”

Doc felt a flash of self-loathing; he hated bullying a child psychologically. But he pressed on. “I’ll be with him the whole time, if that’s what’s bothering you.”

“I think you should discuss it with Neal.”

“You know he’ll say yes.”

She filled her coffee cup from the pot—Ance would have appreciated the old-fashioned percolator—and reached across to top off Doc’s. “Those lots are a mess. You’ll be the whole weekend just cleaning up.”

“Billie, we’re just going to knock the ball around a little. I’m not talking about spreading lime and building a grandstand.” She didn’t answer. “I’ll stop by tomorrow on my way to the bus stop and take a look. A little cleanup wouldn’t hurt us if it’s not too bad.”

“What was that phone call about? It sounded kind of official.”

He considered not letting her change the subject, but Sean was staring at his plate, his face darkening. Doc sat back with his coffee. “Just something at work. Nothing to worry about”

“I do worry, Kevin. You know why.” She looked at him for the first time since before she had commented on the peppers.

He met her gaze. “Everything’s fine. Really.” After a moment she nodded and stood up to get dessert. Doc had been too different from the rest of his family too long not to be able to look someone in the eye and lie.

*     *     *

He hoped his parole officer hadn’t changed his mind.

Lying on his back in Sean’s bed hours later, watching the ceiling grow lighter, he told himself again that if Kubitsky had doubts about the arrangement after re-thinking Maynard Ance’s relationship with Wilson McCoy, he wouldn’t send Sergeant Battle to swing the axe. It was just one of those fears that crept in by darkness and slithered away with the dawn. It was a hefty slice of time out of his parole to spend afraid, and it was the one tiling he hadn’t foreseen all those nights when he lay like this in the constant dusk of his cell thinking about freedom. That was the thing prison taught you: Whatever they gave you they could take away, and afterward it would be worse than if they had never given you anything at all. And he thought he understood then what it was that made ex-convicts who had served half their life want to go back. It wasn’t so much mat they couldn’t adjust to the world outside as it was not being able to stand the suspense. And just understanding that scared him as much as the other.