Stress (15 page)

At first, Wolf’s brush with history promised to be short. Although, as Dexter explained, an extension cord had been run into the living quarters on the top floor from the next building, the room where Wilson McCoy received them on the floor below was lit only by a Coleman lantern standing on the Formica table behind which the black revolutionary sat. McCoy looked far older than his twenty-two years that summer of 1970, hollow-cheeked, vague-eyed, and—the newcomer suspected—balding beneath his Panthers beret. As the interview went on, McCoy lit reefers off one another from a row of them on the table without offering any to his visitors. When Dexter piped up to answer one of the questions put to the applicant, McCoy barked at him to leave the room. Alone with Wolf, the man behind the table asked him if he was queer.

“Are you?”

“That’s none of your fucking business!” McCoy snapped.

“Same answer.”

“I got nothing against Indians, but you can’t trust a fag. You know Hoover’s a fag.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Well, he is. He only hires fags because he’s afraid his agents will spill confidential information to their wives.”

“But a lot of agents are married.”

“That’s just for looks. You don’t look queer, but jail’s been known to turn a man around.”

“Not in six months.”

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

Wolf unzipped his fly and pulled out his cock.

He still treasured the look on Wilson McCoy’s face, the only time he had seen him look truly surprised. His eyes flicked down, lingered, then back up to Wolf’s face when he realized they were lingering. And the Indian learned then that black people can indeed blush. His mouth worked, he glanced toward the door through which Dexter had left. Wolf really thought the longest-lasting fugitive on the FBI’s Most Wanted list was afraid he was going to be raped.

The Indian looked down at his limp phallus. “It isn’t very hard, is it? Now tell me, could any self-respecting fag show off his prick to a stud like Wilson McCoy and avoid getting a boner?”

For the first and last time in their association, McCoy laughed.

“Put it back,” he said. “You made your point. When can you move in?”

“Right now. I left some clothes in my old room, but I bet they sold them to a secondhand store by now for back rent.”

McCoy rolled over on his right hip, pried a thick fold of bills from a back pocket, and flipped it onto the table. “Buy what you need out of that. Your first job’s waiting for you when you get back.”

“What’s that?”

“Throw Dexter out. I’m sick of looking at the perverted son of a bitch.”

That was more than two years ago, and Wolf had almost walked out himself more times than he could count. He had never known anyone to be more caught up in his own orbit than Wilson McCoy. The former Panther—he could only bespoken of as former, because he had had no contact with the rest of that decaying society in all the time Wolf had been with him, or with almost anyone else, for that matter—seemed convinced that every member of every law-enforcement organization in the country was spending every conscious moment on the effort to bring Wilson McCoy to justice. He pored over each issue of the
News, Free Press
, and the national news magazines Wolf brought him, and when there was no mention of him—which was usually the case—he was certain that a blackout had been declared to cover an all-out campaign to pry him loose from his safe house. At first Wolf thought him paranoid. In time he realized Wilson was far less afraid of being caught than he was of being forgotten, and that he had constructed the fantasy of
The United States
v
. Wilson McCoy
out of his own superinflated, easily torn ego. And as Wolf watched this sworn enemy of the white conservative establishment assembling his meager press clippings like some half-remembered starlet, he knew, ahead of all the pundits, that the sixties were over.

Why he had remained loyal to a pile of quivering self-delusion was harder to understand. He supposed it had to do with his lost heritage. Try as he might, the twentieth century had destroyed his ability to believe in the old gods; his exposure to others of his kind, desperately denying the gulf of decades that separated them from the ancient ways, had made him feel alone in a way he had never felt before he went in search of his origins. He had no tribe, no village of his own to look after and to look after him. What he had was Wilson McCoy. It was a poor enough totem, but unlike the legends this one had substance. It didn’t die down with the coals when the sun came up, and it could be depended upon to remain, which was more than could be said about union solidarity. Wilson was there. It didn’t matter that he had no choice. Better to worship the twig caught in the snag than the limb speeding by in the current.

No, there were no pure races.

All this fluttered through Wolfs mind as he waited for the public telephone to ring outside the emergency room at Harper Grace Hospital. Standing guard by the instrument, he had fended off two people who wanted to use it. One, an old woman leaning on a cane who had come in a few minutes earlier with an old man whom Wolf took to be her husband, called the Indian a name in a language that might have been Hungarian and hobbled back to her seat. The other, a man about Wolfs age and weight but three inches taller, a heavy lifter by the look of him, had stormed up demanding he surrender the receiver, then shut his mouth when Wolf reached conspicuously into his jeans pocket for the buck knife he carried whenever he left his magnum in the car, and joined the line behind the teenage girl who was using the only other telephone. That was the thing about Detroit: Go for any place where you might be keeping a weapon and the gesture was understood.

Calling Wilson was a chore the Indian tried to avoid. No lines ran to the condemned building where the wanted man lived and worked, so Wolf had to dial the number of the rib place around the corner and wait more often than not for one of the restaurant’s two full-time employees to free himself up long enough to go fetch Wilson. Ten minutes was the record. While he was waiting, the Indian slid a sample vial of Brut from the inside pocket of his quilted vest and slapped a third of its contents onto his neck and cheeks. Any time he went too long between applications he smelled fish.

After eighteen minutes the telephone rang. “I hope to hell this is good,” Wilson said without greeting. “I froze my favorite testicle off getting down here.”

As if you ever used the son of a bitch
, Wolf thought. Aloud he said, “Opal Ogden’s at Harper Grace. Her mother came with her by ambulance an hour ago.”

“What’s she got, honky’s disease?”

“Pneumonia, they think. Anyway that’s what I overheard. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself by asking. If they hold her it’ll probably be at Hutzel. That’s the children’s facility here.”

“She going to croak?”

“I doubt it.” Actually pneumonia scared the shit out of him. He had seen it carry off relatives and acquaintances in epidemic numbers. The Upper was a severe place, and especially hard on the constitutions of a people given to alcoholism. But the Crownover-Ogden thing was the first real action Wolf had persuaded Wilson to take part in as long as they’d been together. He wasn’t about to discourage him. “I’m thinking this could be a break for us.”

Wilson said nothing, but Wolf could hear him breathing. He went ahead.

“By now the Ogden place is screwed down tighter than Fort Knox. Casing the house all over again to see what they’ve done will take another six weeks.”

“Time enough for ’em to get lazy. We talked about that.”

“
You
talked about it. I said at the start we had to do this fast or forget it.”

“I ain’t in no hurry.”

“You should be. We don’t know that Piper will hold the merchandise six weeks.”

“Oh, he’ll hold it. After what happened here a couple weeks back he’ll hold it between his knees.”

“That razor of yours won’t reach to Pontiac.”

“You got wheels. There ain’t no FBI paper out on you.”

“I didn’t hire on for that shit,” Wolf said. “Listen. The stuffs burning a hole in his supplier’s pocket. Once Piper takes possession of the merch he’s going to move it as fast as he can. The longer he sits on it the better his chances of going to Marion on a federal firearms rap.”

“He won’t stand trial.”

The Hungarian woman was coming his way, clutching the arm of a hospital security officer. The guard was close to sixty, white-haired, with thick glasses and a belly that hung down over his belt buckle. Wolf turned his back on them, shielding the receiver with his body.

“You’re not listening,” he said. “I’m saying maybe we won’t have to wait.”

Wilson sucked air, which meant he’d lit a joint.

“I got ears.”

F
RIDAY NIGHT WAS
R
USSELL’S NIGHT
.

The rest of the brothers and sisters could have Saturday night: Buy a number at Benny’s Flamingo Barber Shop on Twelfth, pick up a bottle of Ripple at one of the markets with plywood in the windows since ’67, hook a pair of big tits and legs all the way up to her ass on Euclid, groove out to some tenth carbon of Aretha or Little Stevie at the Chit-Chat Lounge, show off that new yellow suit from Didney’s Bottom of the Barrel on Burlingame. Sleep it off all day Sunday and back into the coveralls Monday morning. Live one Saturday to the next till you were too old or too full of clap to work, then sit on your welfare checks at the Shrine of the Black Madonna and bitch about your landlord.

Not for Russell. He hated crowds, drinking took too long, and sex never went right for him somehow, he always wound up disappointed or disappointing his partner. Fridays were quieter and less congested. He stopped off at home after work, changed from his marina clothes into anew pair of striped jeans with flared legs—no fucking bell-bottoms—and a sunset-colored shirt with long collar tabs and four buttons on each cuff. On Twelfth he bought a
Chronicle
, read it on a bench in Virginia Park until his connection showed, bought five capsules, and with the prospect of a mellow evening warming his insides, went on to Greenleaf’s and finished the newspaper while waiting to be served his ham hocks and rice. The urge was just beginning to claw at his stomach—a pleasant flutter, actually, this early and with the capsules safe in his pocket—when he left the restaurant and stopped to play a little air ball at his favorite basketball court on Clairmount.
Kareem, you better watch your ass.

The streetlamps plinked on as he was leaving. He was starting to get serious cramps. He’d waited a little too long. He stretched out his arms, spread his fingers. Picked up the pace.

He’d left the Bronco at a vacant service station on Chicago, by a rusting pump frozen at twenty-two cents per gallon. It was his favorite street in the area his parents still referred to as the Black Bottom, with its median of well-kept grass and trees on both sides. As he turned the corner, the door of a big Plymouth parked against the curb popped open in front of him. He stopped short, then started around it.

The man behind the wheel came out fast for his bulk. A vise closed on his wrist and drew it across his middle, pivoting him. His back hit the side of the car hard enough to empty his lungs. Before he could fill them, a thick hard forearm pressed against his throat, shutting off his windpipe. Instantly he was strangling.

The burst of breath in his face was hot and sour with beer and bad digestion. “Russell, Russell. You shouldn’t run when there’s ice on the street. You could break your fucking neck.”

He was trying to identify the voice when the hand holding his wrist let go. Before he could react, something blunt drove deep into his belly. The street went red and white. His bladder let go. His knees liquefied and he grasped at the arm across his throat. In his last conscious moment he thought it was the shits what a man would reach out for to keep himself from slipping beneath the surface of his own urine.

A
FTER SIX YEARS,
J
OE
P
IPER WONDERED WHEN HE
would come to think that his house was worth the crap he had gone through to build it.

For two years after the death of his first wife Maureen, the gun dealer had effectively gone on living in one room of the little house they had shared on Trumbull. Unable to sleep in their old bedroom, he had camped out on the sofa, fully intending to move back in after he had sold or given away their five-piece Joshua Doore bedroom set and donated Maureen’s clothes to the K of C. Only he never got around to it. A chill gripped him every time he passed the uninhabited room on the second floor. When he could no longer bear to climb the stairs, he bought new clothes to replace the ones in their closet. Finally he sold the house and every stick of furniture in it to a well-dressed black real estate agent from Redford. He knew the man was only looking to bring down the housing values in the predominantly Irish neighborhood by renting the place to a black family, after which he would acquire the adjoining properties for a fraction of their former value and sell the lots to the city for parking for nearby Tiger Stadium, but he didn’t care; although he had to stop going to the Shamrock Bar for a while after on of his old neighbors offered to throw a bowl of peanuts into the face of “the nigger-loving bastard” if he attempted to take a seat in the establishment.

The next year found him relatively contented, renting an apartment in one of the newer complexes on the northwest side and dealing guns and explosives out of a barn he leased in Washtenaw County from one stupid son of a bitch of a German farmer who believed him when he said he sold bottled salsa to Mexican restaurants. Then he met Dolly, nearly half his age and twice as pretty on her worst day as Maureen was on her best, God rest her immortal soul, and almost before he knew it he was getting married again and throwing himself into hock for thirty years on a 2,800-square-foot pile of redwood and fieldstone in a glorified trailer park of a walled subdivision in Pontiac. Or rather the promise of one, because when he laid down his $23,900 deposit there wasn’t but one house in the tract, a model unit complete with Palladian windows, a slate-gray kitchen, and underground sprinklers in the front
and
back yards.