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Page 24
“I thought Detroit was supposed to be a big town,” the guy with the cigar says.
The idea that anyone would think Detroit wasn’t a big town surprised me. The tablet I used for school had a drawing on the cover of the tall buildings rising along the Detroit River. There were a couple of big boats in the water and a plane was flying above those buildings. For a second or two I didn’t know what to say. At last I told the guy, “I think they’re talking about downtown.”
He just grunted. “I been downtown,” he says. Then he says, “I guess it’s better than Canada, though, at least what I seen of it.”
As I took off the flat I could hear the guy whistling to himself. “Are you from Chicago?” I ask him without taking my eyes off my work.
The guy laughed as if I’d just told him something funny. “Yeah,” he says, “I never thought of it that way but you could say I come from Chicago. Chicago by way of Brooklyn.”
I’m being real careful to keep working as I talk. “Chicago must be pretty big, huh?” I ask him.
“Yeah,” the guy says. “It is. You should go there some day. It’s some town, all right.”
“I guess I will,” I told him, and just saying it made me feel good. I was really working quick: I tightened the lugs and lowered the car, then gave the lugs a final turn before I put the flat where the spare was and replaced the tools. I knew I did a good job.
“Well,” the guy says, “I guess I found a live one in this town. Thanks, kid, I’m giving you a bonus.” He reaches into his pocket and hands me two silver dollars. I couldn’t believe it—two dollars for that little work. What if I did that three or four times a day? I could make a lot of money. More than my old man, maybe. I was feeling pretty good but it was only up close, when the guy was giving me the money, that I really got a good look at his eyes. There was something hard there, not like what I’m used to seeing in my old man’s eyes but something colder, and for a second or so I was actually scared. Still, it really felt good to have those two coins in my hand.
Then, this is where it gets funny, the guy says, “Go ahead, touch it.” He could see that I’d been looking at his coat. “It’s real, all right,” he said. Well, I put my fingers to that sleeve real slow—as if the priest was letting me touch something in church that was old and expensive, like some golden altar cloth that came from Poland—and I ran my hand across that soft dark fur. I swear, I never felt anything like that before.
“Well,” the guy says, “I got to get back to Chi-town.” He turns toward the car. “You got what it takes, kid,” he says. “You’re going to go far.”
Even after he was gone and the usual traffic was moving down Chene Street once more, ordinary people going by in cheap little cars, a streetcar full of Polacks on their way home with empty lunch boxes, I kept standing there wondering about that guy. He had to be part of the Chicago mob. So what did he come to Detroit for? Could he have murdered someone? Did he bring in liquor from Canada? I kept squeezing the coins he gave me as if I thought they might disappear. I wondered where those coins had been. Over and over I kept remembering what he said: I was going to go far, I had what it takes.
Well, it didn’t take me long to remember that the old man sent me out to get the paper. Those silver coins weren’t going to be any protection against him once he started his raging. And, yeah, sure enough, I can smell the booze when I get home and he’s yelling, “Where the hell have you been, you little bastard? Didn’t I tell you I wanted the paper now? Didn’t I?” In a second the belt was out. Well, it doesn’t do you any good to cry, you just kind of grit your teeth and try to harden yourself against the leather, you suck in your breath, and after a while it’s over. I’ve got those silver dollars, I kept telling myself, they’re mine, they’re my secret. And what the guy said about me, that’s my secret too. When the old man’s had his fill and disappears with the paper, my mother comes in, quiet as a mouse. “Your father works so hard,” she says, “you have to do what he says. Pray that God will forgive you for your disobedience.”
“Yeah, ma, yeah,” I tell her. But I don’t say anything about the coins in my pocket. They belong to me.
It’s what he told Maggie when he first began to think that she was the one, she was someone he could trust. There beside the priests’ garden in the night that smelled of lilacs he told her, “I’m not going to be just another Polack like my old man.”
“You’re not just another Polack,” she told him. “Not to me you aren’t.”
And here in the sky above the western United States, remembering his story, Ziggy’s able to call up all the sensations of that November evening in the 1920’s when he started to dream. He remembers the big Packard and the man who looked like an Indian, remembers the smell of his cigar, the way the gray fedora was pulled down close to his eyes, he remembers clutching the silver dollars, and most of all, he remembers reaching toward the sleeve of the man’s coat.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” he told Maggie that night long ago, still able to touch the moment even earlier when he ran his fingers through that fur. “I never felt anything like it in my life.”