Riverside Drive: Border City Blues

by Michael Januska

  They beat on each other for a solid four rounds before they started staggering around the floor, suffering from heat exhaustion and looking for the opening that might mercifully bring it to an end. Off in a corner Green fanned himself with his straw hat while watching his fighter wither under the strain. The audience took pity on the two but held on tightly to their betting slips.

  McCloskey was hallucinating. He was looking down at him and his father, just as they were that fateful morning. He was in another one of his blind rages, and his father was trying to calm him. Billy entered the room, pulled him off his father, and pinned him against the wall.

  Eckhardt noticed McCloskey was slowing up and letting his guard down. The golden opportunity was presenting itself and Eckhardt responded with a series of quick blows to McCloskey’s torso, sending him stumbling into the ropes. Then Eckhardt moved in for the kill. Green clenched down hard on his cigar, almost biting it in half, and shouted something at the referee.

  McCloskey wasn’t in the ring anymore; he was in the front room back at the house. And he was ready to take a crack at Billy. He shook the sweat off his face and in an explosion of energy sent his brother tumbling back over the low table.

  Eckhardt didn’t know what hit him. McCloskey shook the sweat off his face and was swinging hard at him. McCloskey grazed his face and then drilled a hard left into his gut. Eckhardt was already sore from dehydration and instinctively tried to protect his belly. He handed McCloskey the opportunity to hammer his skull with a series of lightning-fast hooks. Red, amber, and then black.

  Eckhardt’s eyes rolled back and then he folded onto the floor. McCloskey stood over him, cursing Billy and blathering nonsense about the war, their dead mother, Mary, who had died of influenza while they were en route home from the war. Frank told his boys as soon as they got in the door and that was what finally pushed them both over the edge. Billy retreated into a bottle and Jack flew into a blind rage. He spent some nights literally bouncing off the walls. It got so bad his father had to hold him down to keep him from hurting himself.

  McCloskey saw himself turn and move towards his weakling father who had failed them. He remembered swinging, and then the sound of an ambulance and men in white taking Eckhardt away on a stretcher. He came face to face with the fire deep inside him, and in this sweltering furnace it gave him chills.

  By the middle of September, McCloskey had fought nine times in fifteen weeks and suffered only one loss — his first to date. He lost that match only because to win it he would have had to kill his opponent. McCloskey had become a fighting machine. Green himself quietly wondered what the eventual toll might be.

  On the surface McCloskey remained cautious. He saved his winnings and kept his job at the factory. Fighters had short careers, and the ones who didn’t have anything to fall back on had proportionately shorter lives. All the same, he threw himself headlong into the fight world that Green had opened to him.

  But Green’s world was starting to change. The bootleg business was gathering momentum and required his undivided attention. He began to regret starting something with McCloskey he probably knew all along he couldn’t finish. He felt he either had to find McCloskey a real manager or something equally as challenging and lucrative. It occurred to him that there might be a place for McCloskey in the outfit. McCloskey had grit and character; he also knew what it took to get a job done. He had talents that were being wasted in the ring, and Green could see that now.

  “You’re smart,” said Green to McCloskey one day. “You could really go places if you wanted.”

  They were standing on a street corner trading racing tips with a newsboy. It was the middle of September and an unseasonably warm day, what some folks call an Indian summer.

  “C’mon. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  It was time to talk business again. They walked over to the pool hall.

  “I’m not telling you to leave the ring. You do what your gut tells you. All I’m saying is there’s work here for you if you want it.”

  McCloskey was sort of relieved. He felt that he had turned a corner with the fight down at Rouge and was now stuck in a dead end. He wasn’t getting anything out of it anymore. He didn’t really care about the money, or about taking his fight skills to another level and pursuing a title. He had been looking for a way to break it to Green, but now he didn’t have to. Green continued.

  “I feel sort of responsible, like I talked you into something. I hope you don’t have any regrets. I know I don’t.”

  Green had believed in him from the start and helped save McCloskey from himself. And McCloskey not only wanted to pay him back, he wanted to do him proud.

  “A guy should take advantage of every opening that presents itself, both in and out of the ring. If there’s a place for me in the outfit, I’ll give it everything I got.”

  Green smiled and pulled his best bottle and a couple glasses from a desk drawer. He filled them and then passed one to McCloskey.

  “To Wheeler.”

  “To Volstead.”

  Green explained how business had been building steadily since the referendum.

  “I’m telling you, kid, as long as people are drinking we’ll be selling. Dry? What a fucking joke that is. Queen’s Park and the Methodists ought to go into vaudeville together.”

  Green leaned back in his chair and took a drag on his cigar. He punctuated every sentence with a big blue smoke ring.

  “We’re fortunate to be living here in the Border Cities, Killer. It represents an incredible opportunity for us. All these towns are lined up like kegs behind a bar, just waiting to quench the thirst of each and every American between here and Chicago.” He leaned back in his chair. “And then there are the peripheral activities — gambling, money-lending, women, you name it. We play our cards right and by the end of the year we’ll have turned this place into an oasis — our oasis.”

  McCloskey was well aware of how quickly folks were developing a taste for the money, not to mention the thrill that came from bootlegging. Almost overnight the pond had become full of little fish — little fish that were only going to get chewed up by the first big one to come along. Now here was McCloskey, sitting across from that big fish and being asked to be its teeth. An hour and several whiskies later he found himself a sworn member of the outfit, Green’s new Big Six.

  Green took McCloskey’s hand and looked into his eyes. “I know you won’t let me down, Killer.”

  “Thanks, Green.”

  Green held his grip. “I’m your Lieutenant now. You’re one of my soldiers.”

  McCloskey stood firm. “Yes, sir.”

  He had never met anyone like the Lieutenant. He had encountered street fighters, hardened criminals, mercenaries, and business types before, but never someone who was all of these things put together. The only person who even came close was his father. But his father didn’t have the style and the worldliness. He didn’t have a platoon of soldiers behind him, either.

  — Chapter 5 —

  COLLISION COURSE

  The referendum results had a sobering effect on Billy McCloskey. When at the end of the summer there began to be supply issues at his local roadhouse and his liver finally got a day off, he took the opportunity to ask the proprietor what all the fuss was about.

  Pierre explained it to him, and Billy, being fairly lucid, took it pretty hard, like he was just handed a prison sentence. He asked Pierre how he planned to remedy the situation. Pierre told Billy not to worry — everything would be taken care of. He was in good with Windsor’s biggest bootlegger.

  This took Billy by surprise. There were plenty of smugglers out here on the Ojibway shores, and lots of folks making moonshine, including his pa. He told Pierre he didn’t have to go to Windsor to get his liquor. Pierre saw it a little differently.

  “I didn’t have any choice, Billy.”

  The barfly smelled a rat. “Oh yeah? Who was it set you up?”

  Pierre hesitated. He should have kept his big mouth shut. He brac
ed himself before uttering the words. “Your brother.”

  After Billy climbed back on his barstool he started with the questions. “When did my brother get back? Who is he working for? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

  “We tried,” said Pierre, “but you’ve been drunk since Armistice.”

  This news didn’t sit well with Billy. As far as he was concerned, Jack had deserted his friends and family a long time ago and had no right coming back like this only to put the screws on the local citizenry. It just wasn’t right.

  “Does my pa know about this?”

  There was no point in holding back now.

  “Yep.”

  Billy gave that one a think while Pierre riffled through the icebox below the bar.

  “There’s one legal beer left and it’s got your name on it.”

  “Keep it for a souvenir.”

  “You feeling okay? Hey — where you going?”

  Billy was going to fight fire with fire. The first thing he did was bring a telephone into the house.

  “Welcome to the modern age,” he said to his pa, “now you can call ahead to Chappell House so they have your suds ready when you get there.”

  “They’ll have the cops ready for me too.”

  Then he invested in a better boat for ferrying his product — a 28-footer with 180 horses. It was low-slung and lightweight, making it easy to hide among the bulrushes and manoeuvre through the canals. Billy christened her River Rat with a jar of his pa’s moonshine. Actually, it was weak lemonade; Billy never let a drop go to waste.

  Next he developed partnerships that would save him work and buy him a few allies. Some folks in the area had connections in Quebec distilleries, and Billy arranged either to act as their local wholesaler or to broker deals for them into the States.

  Lastly he cleared some space for surplus liquor in the old cabin that stood between the house and the shore. Newlyweds Frank and Mary McCloskey had lived here while the house was being built. It later became Frank’s fishing cabin, his “home away from home,” and where he kept his still. More recently it was where Billy spent his lost weekends. And when those weekends turned into weeks, his pa would have to drag him out and leave him in the sun to dry. Now the cabin had a new purpose.

  “Yer not getting rid of my still, are you, boy?”

  “No, Pa,” said Billy. “We’re gonna need it.”

  It was all about supply and demand, and Billy was ideally situated. Several weeks later — by the end of October — Billy became the leader of a smuggling outfit that served a small but potentially lucrative territory just downriver from Detroit, mainly around Ecorse and the Rouge. Part of him thought it was a nice little cottage industry. Another part of him thought it was only the beginning.

  It was at a ceremony at the Armouries for Great War Veterans where Jack first heard about his brother’s ambitions.

  “I thought he was working for you, Jack,” said an old comrade from the 99th.

  McCloskey tried not to look surprised. “No, no he’s not.”

  “But you knew about it, right?”

  The fellow was goading him on, and he knew it.

  “Sure. We have an agreement.”

  “Whatever you say, Jack.”

  “Goddamnit,” McCloskey muttered under his breath as the soldier walked away. If this yolk knew the score, the Lieutenant probably did too. Life was suddenly very complicated again. It was just like when they were kids; Billy had to have the same as what Jack had, and all the better if it took a little away from Jack in the bargain.

  There was that, and then there was the Lieutenant. If he knew that Billy and some ragtag outfit were encroaching on his territory, and by territory that meant everything within a hundred miles outside of Detroit, there would be serious hell to pay.

  Once again McCloskey made a compromise. In an effort to save his father from getting tangled in any of this, he would deal only with Billy. He telephoned Pierre at Chappell House and asked him to keep tabs on his pa’s movements. When Pierre called back a few days later, he informed Jack that his father had gone fishing up in Michigan. Jack then took the opportunity to drive out to Ojibway to have a word with his brother. It promised to be an interesting conversation.

  “Long time no see,” said Jack.

  “Yeah, long time.”

  They were standing on the stretch of property between the house and Front Road. Billy was tying up a young peach tree. He looked like a new man, Jack thought.

  “You know why I’m here?”

  “Yeah, you come to fix the hole in the roof.”

  “You’re not going to give me a hard time about this, are you?”

  “Give you a hard time? Jack, I’m just a small-time businessman trying to make a buck.”

  “I want you to quit your bootlegging before my boss asks me to do something I really don’t want to do.”

  “Like what?”

  Billy took a step closer to his brother. He was lean, muscular, all springs and coils. He was prepared for a fight but Jack wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

  “I’m telling you, Billy, if it weren’t for Pa —”

  “If it weren’t for Pa what?”

  “Just leave him out of this,” said Jack and walked away. Billy followed him to his car.

  “Gosh, Jack, I didn’t know you cared. He’ll ask about you, you know. What should I tell him? That you had dinner reservations in Detroit? That you had to go harass our neighbours?”

  Jack turned. “I mean it — leave him out of this.”

  “He’s in it, Jack, like he always has been.”

  “What the hell are you trying to prove, Billy?”

  “That like your boss, you’re just a bum in a fancy suit. I’m the one out here on the homestead, looking out for my own. You’re a long way from Ojibway now, aren’t you, Jack?”

  “You’re so full of shit you’d embarrass an outhouse.”

  Jack climbed back into his Studebaker. He had wanted to ask Billy about Clara, his sister-in-law, but he was all out of polite talk.

  “Shut down your little lemonade stand, Billy, before I have to come back and shut it down for you.”

  Jack’s car kicked dust all the way up the path to the road. After regaining control of himself and the Studebaker, he got to thinking. Sure, what Billy said was true: smuggling was the family business and their pa was a player. But Billy was such a schemer, a sloppy one at that, and their pa could get caught in his undertow. Jack knew that unless he could get Billy to cease and desist, they were all headed for a heap of trouble.

  Meanwhile, all fired up by the exchange with his brother, Billy decided to step up his operation and get his father even more involved. Locals started taking him more seriously. Eventually, a neighbour, Moe Lesperance, said he had a relative in Belle River who wanted in on the action. Billy was intrigued but played hard to get.

  “Let me think about it.”

  Belle River was centrally located at the top of Essex County — a rectangular peninsula framed by Lake St. Clair to the north, the Detroit River to the north and west, and Lake Erie to the south. On a map it resembled a fist delivering an uppercut to Michigan’s jaw. Where Lake St. Clair flows into the Detroit River, strip farms give way to a string of municipalities known as the Border Cities: Riverside, Ford City, and Walkerville, where the river narrows until it’s a mile wide at Windsor and you’d swear you can hear the factory whistles in Detroit. Next is Sandwich, and at the point where the river runs due south is Ojibway, a tiny farming community. Heading out of the Border Cities and then east along Erie’s north shore, you eventually hit Kingsville. If you travelled north as the crow flies, from there you’d wind up back in Belle River. Billy saw Ojibway and Belle River as strategic locations, providing easy access to waterways, Windsor and Detroit, and the interior of Essex County.

  “You know, Belle River just might work,” he said to his father one day out of the blue. They were chopping wood in the yard. It was early December and their shoulders an
d arms were powdered with the season’s first snowfall. “We could set up a route along the back roads of the county. If we take Maidstone Crossing, we might even be able to pick up some extra business along the way.”

  His father saw an opportunity to control the overland supply routes into the Border Cities. The neck of the peninsula was less than twenty-five miles of flat farmland with only a few passable roads and a couple of railway lines connecting it to the rest of the province. If they controlled that frontier, it would only leave the river, and the river was a fast-moving no man’s land.

  “Tell you what,” Frank McCloskey said, “I’ve done a bit of business out there before. I’ll make the trip.”

  Billy smiled. This is just what he wanted to hear. Plans were drawn up for an annex operation in Belle River. Boats would be refurbished over the winter, materials ordered for new docks, and stills fired up along the county roads.

  Less than a week later, Lesperance got a call from his cousin Bernie. The deal was off. What Lesperance and McCloskey & Son were unaware of was that the Lieutenant’s boys were also knocking on doors in Belle River. Any operation that impacted negatively on their business had to be either assimilated or eliminated. They were finished making overtures; now they were delivering ultimatums. Frank McCloskey took Lesperance out to investigate, but now no one would even give them the time of day.

  The Lieutenant called Jack into his office to explain this business with his family. Before stepping across the threshold, McCloskey asked himself which would be worse: to lie and say he knew nothing, or to tell the Lieutenant the truth and say he knew but hadn’t come clean. McCloskey lied. He owed it to blood being thicker than whisky. He swore to the Lieutenant that he knew nothing about their activities and in fact hadn’t had words with them in years. The Lieutenant wasn’t interested in the family history. He just wanted the matter resolved.

  “Listen, Killer, the boys’ll take care of those frogs in the county, but I want you to lean on your father and brother.”