Motown (32 page)

He drove down the straight, smooth shotgun barrel of his thoughts, not paying attention to anything outside, trusting his hands on the wheel and his feet on the pedals to guide him scratchless through the physical world. The yelp of his tires as he stopped at a sign jerked him out of the barrel and he looked around at an unfamiliar neighborhood of horizontal houses and new trees planted in twin straight rows. The four lanes and long stretch of pavement ahead and behind, unbroken by curves or angles as if it had been laid out with a T-square, told him he was on Woodward, somewhere north of Highland Park. He didn’t remember leaving Jefferson and the route didn’t lead to his apartment. Freed of thought, his hands and his feet had headed toward Mrs. Hertler’s house and his old room.

A horn blatted behind him and a car pulled out into the inside lane to pass. When he stopped at the sign the driver glared across at Rick, then smiled. After a beat Rick recognized him, the long black hair pushed back behind his ears, the mirrored glasses. The black Mustang confirmed it. He was the young man Rick had drag-raced on Woodward the day he had learned that he would have to give up his room and use of the candy-apple red GTO to Mrs. Hertler’s son. A thousand years ago.

The young man slid his glasses down his nose and looked over them at the silver Camaro, frowning appreciatively. Then he slid them back up, showed his teeth, and gunned the Mustang’s engine.

Rick flipped on his indicator and turned right, leaving the black car grumbling at the sign. On the way back to his apartment he stayed under the speed limit and obeyed all signs and traffic signals.

Q
UINCY FOUND
L
YDELL’S NEW
room at Detroit Receiving by tracking the music all the way from the nurses’ station. Lydell was propped up in bed with his eyes shut and his hands folded on his stomach. He looked like a corpse. On the TV mounted near the ceiling Bugs Bunny was giving the Tasmanian Devil a nervous breakdown, but in mime; there was no room for any sound but the Supremes shouting “Itching in My Heart” from the transistor radio on the bedside table. Quincy picked it up and dialed it off.

Lydell opened his eyes, saw Quincy, and grinned. His friend was getting used to his resemblance to a skull when he did that. “Hey, bro. That there’s my life support.”

“When I brought it here I didn’t think you was going to use it to drive out cockroaches,” Quincy said. “The nurses was doing odds and evens to see which one was going to get to throw it out the window and you after it when I come along.”

“You should of let them. Maybe that Shannon’d win. She likes me.”

“She the one with the tits?”

“They all got tits; that’s why they call them nurses. Last time she give me a sponge bath I tried to impress her, but I think they put saltpeter in my i.v.”

Quincy pointed his chin at the curtain dividing the dim room. “Who’s next door?”

“Search me. I think he died.”

“How’s the food?”

Lydell lifted a hand with a flexible tube taped to the underside of the wrist. “I’ll ring for a straw and you can try it yourself.”

“Guess I wasn’t paying attention to what I was saying.”

“No good, man.
One
of us got to listen.”

“Krystal says hello.”

“That’s nice. She never said it when I was around.”

“Well, you know Krystal.”

“Too short. How’s the old lady?”

The woman Lydell boarded with had been too stiff with arthritis to come visit. “The joints, you know.” Quincy shrugged.

“I bet she been sleeping with that hot water bottle. I told her that wet heat just makes it worse.”

“She says she’ll be off her butt to cook you kidneys when you get out. She says they’re your favorite. I didn’t know that.”

“I ain’t getting out.”

“Want me to open them blinds? View from up here’s better than what you had on three.”

“You bring the cigs?”

“Now, what you want with them? They’re what put you in here.”

Lydell grunted in disgust, rummaged in the drawer of the table, and fell back. “C’mon. They only put me to sleep so’s they can sneak in and take ’em away.”

“Ain’t you dying fast enough?”

“Dogs. The boy went and said the word.”

Quincy took the pack of Kents out of his shirt pocket, opened it, and gave him one. “I never knew you to just up and roll over.” He held the match.

The smoke came out in a sigh. Lydell put his head back against the window. “I seen about a thousand numbers come up. I figure mine’s past due.”

“Doc says it’s operable.”

“He tell you what they got to take out?”

“Well, there’s always craps.”

Lydell grinned, puffed, and plucked a shred of tobacco from his lower lip. He frowned. “Some son of a bitch stole the jade holder my daddy give me.”

“You won it off Joe Petite on three straight throws.”

“My daddy’d of give me one like it if he didn’t run off. Hear from Wilson?”

“Too early.”

“I see on TV the cops hit Beatrice Blackwood’s place.”

“She made bail. No big thing.”

“Three raids in two weeks. I figure the cops know. That Wilson’s all mouth and no balls.”

“If that was the case he’d be in jail all the time.”

“Maybe that’s how he stays out.”

“They ain’t arrested me,” Quincy said. “No reason. For just about the first time since I can remember I ain’t doing nothing against the law.”

“How’s it feel?”

“Not as bad as I thought.”

“I hear once you get used to it you don’t never want to go back.”

“That’s cornholing.”

“I never done that either.”

Quincy stuck his hands in his pockets. “I’m thinking maybe I been wasting my time with numbers. I’m thinking maybe Mahomet’s on to something with this civil rights thing.”

“Forget that racket. The money’s for shit and the cops bust sticks on your head.”

“I ain’t thinking of making money at it,” Quincy said. “Didn’t you feel nothing at all when the police was slapping you and Mahomet around?”

“I felt a cop’s arm across’t my throat and my arm getting busted.”

“I don’t know, Lydell. You and me we always laughed at Wilson McCoy and that bunch, marching and throwing bricks and getting the shit beat out of them for no money. Maybe they been right all along. Not about what they been doing, but why they done it. Maybe change is coming.”

“Take a hot bath and forget about it.”

“No, really. I been studying on it a lot lately.”

“Don’t turn Christer on me, Quincy. You’re all I got.” Lydell held out the cigarette. “You better put that out now and find me a nurse. I ain’t feeling too good.”

Quincy got one from the station, a small dark woman of about thirty with a nice shape, and waited in the corridor while she went in. A white man in his fifties shuffled past in paper slippers and a checked robe, using his i.v. stand as a walking stick. He had a little hole in the white gauze wrapped around his throat, and from time to time he inserted the filter end of a burning cigarette in the hole. Smoke blew out.

Quincy felt heat between his fingers, looked down, and saw he was still holding Lydell’s Kent. He dropped it quickly and mashed it underfoot.

He felt conspicuous. He was wearing his chalkstripe double-breasted over peach silk. Suddenly he was convinced he looked like a pimp. He wanted to go home and change clothes, but he hadn’t a gray suit or a white shirt to his name.

The nurse came out. She had large chocolate-brown eyes. “Someone’s been smoking in there.”

“Sorry.”

“You’d better finish your visit. That sedative will take effect in a few minutes.”

“Thanks. You Shannon?”

She put a hand on her hip. “Now, what’s that boy been saying about me?”

“He’d rather be kicked by you than kissed by Diana Ross.”

“One of you lights up in that room again he’ll get his wish. You, too. I’ve carried around bigger men than you.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“I already did.” She touched his arm, then walked away down the hall.

Lydell was lying flat with the TV off. From the doorway, Quincy noticed for the first time that his friend was going bald in front. He hadn’t seen him often without his hat. Quincy approached the bed. “I see what you mean about that Shannon. A man could get took care of by worse.”

“You ought to see what I get at night.”

“Cuter than Shannon?”

“Like Moms Mabley.”

“Want me to bring you anything next time?”

“Pack of Rents.”

Quincy rested his hands on the bedrail where other hands had worn the white enamel down to bare metal. “You got any ideas at all about why you and me are friends?”

“You used to wail the shit out of the big kids when I couldn’t talk my way clear.”

“That’s why I’m
your
friend. How come you’re mine?”

“‘Cause you’re too big, and you’re uglier than you are big. I bet Krystal puts a bag over her head too just in case yours comes off.”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“No.”

“Me either.”

Lydell closed his eyes. Quincy was about to leave when they opened again and turned his way. “What’s that you said once’t about a Viking funeral?”

“I don’t recall it.”

“Sure you do.”

“It was in
Beau Geste,”
Quincy said. “When Gary Cooper and his brothers was kids in the movie they thought that was the best way to go out, burning in a boat cast adrift on the water. That’s what his brothers done to him in the end when he got killed. It didn’t mean nothing. I was just talking to hear myself.”

“Think you can fix up something like it for me?”

“In twenty or thirty years, when it’s time.”

A hand too bony to support Lydell’s World Series ring closed on one of Quincy’s. “No shit, Quincy. This here’s Lydell. We went in together on our first whore.”

“Man, she was ugly.”

“First whores is supposed to be. I ain’t much for water. A fire’ll do. Make it kind of big, huh?”

Quincy laid his other hand on top of Lydell’s. “I’ll burn down the town.”

“Shiiit.” Lydell grinned and went to sleep.

T
HE LITTLE MAN BEHIND
the counter was getting to be a rarity in Greektown, an immigrant who didn’t go home to the suburbs after dark. His scalp glittered in the fluorescent light through curly hair gone the pink of his skin and the weight of his moustache seemed to be pulling his flesh away from the bone. His eyes, one of them cataracted, looked a question that through the years he had pared down to no words at all.

“Ouzo,” Rick said.

The Greek glanced at the clock at the end of the counter—two minutes to 2:00 a.m., closing time—seemed to shrug, and bagged a plain bottle off the shelf behind the cash register. He made his only comment as he was handing Rick his change. “Drink a hole in a clear morning.”

Rick drove home, poured two inches of the clear spirits into a tumbler, and added water, watching the liquid cloud up. That part always fascinated him. The first sip tasted like licorice. By the fifth the taste was no longer noticeable.

In high school, when the Model A died finally, he had worked nights pumping gas until he’d saved $150, enough to buy a 1939 white Oldsmobile coupe off a widow in the next block who hadn’t had it out of the garage since her husband died. For weeks he’d haunted every junkyard within reasonable driving distance of his parents’ home, picking up a carburetor here, a set of plugs there, and when he was finished with the Olds he had what he still liked to think of as the first genuine hot rod in Detroit. He’d have framed his first speeding ticket—ninety-two in a twenty-five—if he hadn’t had to send it in with his payment. It had cost him the price of a new set of tires and the use of the car for one whole summer when his father found out.

Sitting there drinking he could smell the Olds’s mohair interior.

He hadn’t had a drink alone since leaving the police department. Not that he had any such problems, but he had seen good officers under hack for some chickenshit complaint drink themselves right out of society, and he hadn’t been about to give those maggots at I.A.D. the satisfaction. He topped off his glass from the bottle.

With his first paycheck from the city he had made a down payment on a 1957 Chevy, red and white with tail fins till hell wouldn’t have them and a speedometer that topped out at 120, although he had found out on the John Lodge that it would do better. Within six months the car was repossessed for missed payments. It was the memory of that, being dropped off at home by his partner at the end of a double shift to find the Chevy gone and a note from the finance company, that had changed his view of department regulations prohibiting the acceptance of gratuities.

He could read the shelf clock that had come with the apartment without turning on a light. Outside the window the night sky was beginning to peel away from a pale horizon.

In between there had been a Buick sedan, black, with a profile like the tortoise leaning forward at the starting line and three silver holes on each side of the hood and an exhaust that sounded like a twin inboard. He had wrapped that one around a telephone pole in rural Oakland County, total wreck and ten days at Receiving with his jaw wired shut and one leg in a cast. A salvage yard had given him forty dollars for what was left of the car, just about what Rick had paid for anesthesia.

Cars were his life, the little bratty fast ones and the big chesty loud ones, the high-strung foreign jobs that spent most of their time on hydraulic lifts and the Norman Rockwell workhorses that idled their way up vertical hills and kept on going miles after their crankcases squeaked dry and all the water had boiled out of their radiators. He would rather spend Sunday under a greasy chassis with particles of rust falling into his eyes than a week in a whorehouse, and what did he have to show for it, this lifelong love affair with the internal combustion engine? A leg that still throbbed every time it rained and a furnished apartment with a bum shower. And a stack of letters just now catching the light on the writing desk by the window.

He poured another two inches, without water. The letters interested him more than the chemical reaction now.