Motor City Burning (13 page)

He told himself that maybe this was his new home and refuge: this feeling of release he got when he came to this magical place.

To his delight, Louis Dumars and Clyde Holland were sitting right where they'd been on Opening Day. “Well, well, well,” Louis called when he saw Willie coming up the steps. “Look who's back. If it ain't Mo-fuckin-beel, Ala-goddam-bama!”

They smacked palms. Clyde repeated the greeting, then looked Willie up and down and said, “Where you pick up them vines, boy? Some watermelon patch?”

“No,” Willie said, strangely pleased by the teasing. “This is what we use to wear when I worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee down South a few years back. You know, Snick. It's helping me remember things.”

“Student nonviolence my ass,” Clyde said with a laugh. “You looks like a motherfuckin hick.”

Clyde did not look like a hick. In his expensive sunglasses, colorful dashiki, creased slacks and sandals, he looked like what he was—a prosperous black man enjoying his day of leisure.

Earl Wilson was pitching again for the Tigers, and he took a 4-0 lead into the eighth inning. After getting one out he gave up a single and a walk, and Mayo Smith replaced him with John Warden. This time there were no boos as Wilson walked slowly off the field, his head held high. The man, Willie thought, had a long ton of poise and dignity. Louis and Clyde and Willie stood to join the cheering. Wilson tipped his cap before vanishing into the dugout.

Warden promptly gave up a walk and a grand slam and just like that the score was tied and the joy was gone and the stadium was roiling with anger.

“Dig a hole, Warden!” someone shouted.

“Yank the bum!”

“Like I say,” Clyde said, shaking his head, “ficklest motherfuckers in the world.”

Fred Lasher replaced Warden and promptly put the fire out. In the bottom of the ninth inning Gates Brown drove in the winning run with a pinch-hit single to left field, and the place erupted. John Warden's sins were already forgotten.

“Didn't I tell you Gates the best pinch-hitter in the game?” Louis exulted, accepting hand slaps from Clyde and half a dozen delirious strangers.

In the lull between games, Willie went exploring and returned to the bleachers with three cups of beer and a bag of peanuts in a cardboard tray just as Clyde was saying, “Alphonso done fucked up.”

“Who's Alphonso?” Louis asked, thanking Willie for the beer.

“Remember on Opening Day when I tole you bout a client a mine name of Alphonso Johnson got picked up by the po-lice for questioning on a murder during the riot?” Louis and Willie nodded. “Well, turns out the po-lice got a tip, and while they had Alphonso downtown they tore up his crib. Found his gun and claimed they matched it to the bullet they took out some dude's head who died during the riot, some fireman. It was a lie, a course, but suddenly dumbass Alphonso believes he's in a world a shit.”

“So what happened?” Willie said. There was a roaring in his ears.

“I'm not all the way sure,” Clyde said. “What I do know is he signed a confession—after I tole him not to say a word less I was in the room with him!”

“You and me both know the po-lice done beat it outta him,” Louis said.

All Willie could think about was how grateful he was that there were no more guns in his car or anywhere near his apartment. He tried to remember what Wes had done with those last three guns before leaving for Chicago, but he couldn't.

Once the second game started, Willie managed to quit worrying about the guns and the police. The day was too fair—soft sunshine, bleached white clouds marching across the sky. Gates Brown started in left field for Willie Horton, an acceptable substitution in Willie's eyes, but he was disappointed that Ed Mathews was inserted for Norm Cash at first base. Willie had played first base in high school and at Tuskegee, and he was developing great respect for Cash's fielding and hitting. It was hard to argue with the results, though. Mathews smashed a three-run homer in the fourth inning and Al Kaline added a two-run shot in the sixth.

When the score reached 7-0 in the seventh inning, fans began moving for the exits. But once again Louis and Clyde and Willie stayed put, bound together by the unspoken understanding that even watching a mop-up job here in this beautiful green room surpassed anything that awaited them down on the streets of Detroit.

Clyde bought one last round of beers, then turned to Willie. “You still workin that busboy job?”

“Fraid so.”

“Where's it at?”

“Oakland Hills Country Club. Way out in honky land.”

“No shit. One a my best clients is a member there. Man name of Chick Murphy.”

“The Buick dealer?”

“Thas right. Man's a prince. Traded with him for a new Deuce and a Quarter just last week.”

“You're Chick Murphy's lawyer?”

“Not his personal lawyer. He calls me whenever one a his nigger mechanics gets liquored up and does something stupid. I make a nice chunk a change off them fools.”

Every day, it seemed, the big city got a little smaller. And Chick Murphy seemed to have satisfied customers all over this shrinking town.

The second game ended 7-0, and the day's sweep left the Tigers two games ahead of second-place Cleveland. It was a glorious day to be a Detroit Tigers fan. Willie was feeling so good he accepted Clyde's offer of a ride home in his new Deuce and a Quarter. It was fire-engine red with a white convertible top and white seats, AM-FM radio, power windows, much flashier than Uncle Bob's Deuce, and it beat the hell out of the DSR. Willie didn't want the party to end just yet, so he asked Clyde to drop him off at the Chit Chat Lounge.

The place was packed, as it always was when the Tigers were in town. Aziz was sitting on a barstool drinking a Vernor's ginger ale because he was a Muslim and he never drank alcohol. Next to him sat Erkie, who was drinking a shot of Old Overholt and a Stroh's chaser because that was all he ever drank. Willie made his way through the mob toward them.

Though his bar-hopping days were past, Willie stopped by the Chit Chat from time to time because the walls were covered with Tigers memorabilia, and Izzy Gould, the three-day Jew who owned the place, always unplugged the jukebox and tuned the radio to WJR on game days. The jukebox was an old Seeburg full of great records, everything from Sarah Vaughan to Clarence Carter to Bo Diddley. To top it off, the Chit Chat was on Euclid just a few blocks from Willie's apartment, which meant he could crawl home if he had a few too many.

When he reached the bar he saw that Erkie had a Viceroy cigarette stuck in the gap where his second tooth on the lower right side used to be. His head was shrouded in so much smoke that at first Willie thought he was on fire. Normally Erkie was in high spirits when the Tigers won, but now he looked glum.

“Why the long face, Erk?” Willie said, sliding onto the empty stool next to him. Izzy Gould put a bottle of Stroh's in front of Willie and rapped the bar twice with a knuckle, his way of letting regulars know the first one was free.

“That fuckin Kaline!” Erkie moaned without removing the cigarette. It bobbed when he talked. Willie realized he was blotto, which was no surprise. Erkie spent every waking hour on that barstool, directly beneath the Hamm's beer sign, waiting for someone to buy him a drink. The Hamm's sign had a waterfall made of tinfoil that actually appeared to tumble over rocks, especially after you'd had a few.

“What's your beef with Kaline? He hit a two-run homer in the second game.”

“Sonofabitch—it was the 307th of his career. Broke Hank Greenberg's club record.”

Just then Izzy set a shot of brown liquor in front of Willie, a fresh shot of Old Overholt in front of Erkie and a shot of Vernor's ginger ale in front of Aziz. Izzy didn't want teetotalers to feel left out.

“This round's on the house!” Izzy shouted. “To Hammerin' Hank!”

“To Hammerin' Hank!” everyone shouted back, flipping their shot glasses.

Now Willie understood Erkie's long face. Erkie had forgotten more about the Tigers than most men would ever know. Willie had always been a sucker for old-timers, and whenever he bumped into Erkie he gladly bought him shots of Old Overholt just to keep him talking. Erkie's two favorite Tigers of all time were the “G-Men”—Charlie Gehringer, the Mechanical Man, at second base and the great Hank Greenberg at first.

Aziz said, “Finish telling the sad story about Ty Cobb after his retirement, Mr. Erk.” Aziz was a sucker for old-timers, too.

“Where was I?” Erkie said, his cigarette bobbing. “Oh yeah. After he retired, this woulda been along about in the Thirties, Cobb used to go big-game hunting out West with that famous writer, you know, what's his name, the bullfight guy?”

Aziz gave him a blank look.

Willie said, “Ernest Hemingway?”

“Thas right, Hemmenway. Later on, in the Fifties, Cobb played golf with President Eisenhower hisself. But he passed a few years back, not a friend in this round world. In the end, all that fame and all that Co-Cola stock didn't do him a lick a good.” He drained his beer. “You know, it's funny. I knowed the man was a red-ass first time I laid eyes on him at Halloran's, where I use to wash dishes. Man was what they called a nigger-breaker during slave times. But much as he hated us, I still felt sorry for the way he died. Ain't nobody deserves to die all alone like that.”

The old man reminded Willie of his father, Reverend Otis, who was forever preaching to his sons that racism was a sickness and it was their Christian duty to love the racist just as they should love a victim of polio or cancer. Willie tried to do his Christian duty, though in the end he failed. His brother didn't even bother to try.

As Erkie launched into another Tigers story, Willie turned to watch the sports wrap-up on the TV bolted to the ceiling in the corner. They replayed Kaline's historic home run and even flashed a picture of Hank Greenberg.

Willie ended up closing the place down with a skinny white hooker from West Virginia named Ginger and Tommy Slenski, a DSR bus driver who had worked that afternoon and was still wearing his uniform. Everyone called him Ralph because he looked like Jackie Gleason on “The Honeymooners.” He was telling Ginger a disjointed story about a mob setting his bus on fire during the riot, but the long day of drinking had finally caught up with Willie and he had trouble following Ralph's story.

As he weaved back to his apartment, Willie considered how rich the day had been. How many days do you learn new things about H. Rap Brown, Ernest Hemingway, Ty Cobb, Dwight Eisenhower, Hank Greenberg and Ralph Ellison? As rich as the list was, he had the nagging feeling he was forgetting something. When he got home and turned on the late news, he remembered what it was.

A Channel 2 reporter, a sharp-looking black lady with a big Afro and a red silk scarf, was interviewing two detectives in front of 1300 Beaubien Street—a fat, silver-haired white guy and a dapper black dude. They were explaining that Alphonso Johnson, a paroled felon, had confessed to the murder of Detroit fireman Carlo Smith, who was shot by a sniper during last summer's riot.

Then there was a picture on the screen of a white woman identified as Helen Hull, a lumpy old doughball with harlequin glasses, her gray hair pulled back into a bun. The reporter was saying that the Detroit grocer, shot dead while looking out a window in the Harlan House Motel, was now the victim of the last unsolved homicide from the riot. She signed off with: “Police say their investigation into her death is continuing. This is Sylvia King reporting live from Detroit police headquarters for WJBK.”

Willie snapped off the TV and swallowed four aspirin and took a long hot shower. But when he lay down in bed the ceiling started spinning and he spent an hour waiting for it to stop. The whole time a question ate at him: What had become of those last three guns from the trunkload he and Wes had brought up to the city a year ago? There was only one person who knew the answer. In the morning Willie would make a long-distance phone call he dreaded.

As he lay there in the dark, he kept seeing the two detectives, the white one with the silver hair and the black one with the crisp suit, and he kept seeing the doughy dead white woman named Helen Hull. The sight of her made the stone of guilt in his gut bigger and harder and colder than ever. The tree outside his window shivered in the breeze. A siren howled. He could feel the big city getting smaller, closing in.

PART TWO

TINDERBOX

8

D
OYLE WAS GUNNING THE
P
LYMOUTH OUT THE
L
ODGE
F
REEWAY
, weaving through traffic, honking the horn, gripping the steering wheel like he was trying to break the thing in two. Jimmy Robuck, not one to get nervous in the passenger seat of a car or anywhere else, said, “You might want to ease off that gas pedal, Frank. The lady ain't goin nowhere.”