by Scott Lasser
III
DIRK’S ARCHES ACHED, standing around all day in shit-kicker boots popular with a certain type of brother in a certain type of business. Miles had even commented on them, and Dirk told him about a store on Grand River Avenue that would have his size, fourteen, which wasn’t exactly Bob Lanier but it was big. Miles had ambition in heroin. He sensed a comeback. He’d apparently trained with remnants of YBI, and this meant he was likely to be a disciplined trafficker. He’d caught Dirk’s attention because he was quiet, operated with a very small crew, and was said to move size, God knew how. Dirk promised Miles quantities equal to Miles’s ambition; the goods would come over in trucks filled with auto parts made at a Delphi plant in Ontario. The story was Dirk’s idea. Everyone, he told his boss, McMahon, believed that the auto industry had privilege at border crossings. Today he’d driven across the Ambassador Bridge and had Miles meet McMahon in Windsor. McMahon was hopeless for normal undercover work, but he was white bread enough, and nervous enough, to play a crooked Canadian with auto industry connections.
“Where’d you get a name like Miles?” Dirk asked while they waited in line at Canadian customs. Dirk was fishing; you never knew what would come out.
Miles looked over. “What’s it to you?”
“Just wondered.”
“Where’d you get a name like Barry?”
From the FBI, Dirk thought. “My momma, after her pops,” he said.
Miles looked straight ahead. “I got mine from my momma, too.”
“You’re the first brother I’ve ever met with that name,” Dirk said.
“That’s ’cause my momma’s white.”
“Wow. That’s something,” Dirk said.
“She’s a good woman, my mom. She’d have a heart attack, seeing me here with you.”
“Yeah,” Dirk said. “Mine would, too.”
“What you tell yours, when she asks you what you’re doing all the time?”
“She’s dead.”
“You’re a lucky man,” Miles said.
• • •
DIRK LOVED BEING home. He loved the house, with its solid walls and wood floors, its open spaces. After a day on the streets, coming home was like getting back to the garden. He could hear his wife, Shelly, in the kitchen with their daughter. They were talking, conspiring maybe. He couldn’t make it out, but he liked listening to them. Not much of a talker himself, Dirk liked the voices of women.
“Whatcha doing, Daddy?” Michelle called out, walking toward him now from the kitchen. It was shocking to look up sometimes and see how tall she’d become.
“Resting,” he answered.
“Long day.”
“Very,” he agreed.
“Mom wants to know if you want a drink.”
A minute later his daughter served him a vodka and soda, the perfect antidote to a day fighting drugs. He asked her about her schoolwork, if she wanted his help with her math. He would have helped, but he was thankful when she said no. He didn’t want to move.
The phone rang. Shelly got it in the kitchen. He watched as Michelle stood perfectly still, listening.
“One of your pals?” he asked.
“Naw, Mom wouldn’t be talking to them for so long.”
• • •
AFTER DINNER MICHELLE went upstairs to call her friends—Dirk allowed her a phone jack in her room, but not a separate line—and Dirk and Shelly cleaned up the kitchen. He cleared, then dried. She didn’t trust him to wash her good dishes any more than she trusted the dishwashing machine he’d bought her when the last COLA raise came through. This was fine. He liked drying, found it soothing, as he did many domestic chores.
“Everett’s coming over,” she said, hands in the soap.
“Great. What night?”
“Tonight. Says he needs to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“He wouldn’t tell me, and believe me, I asked at least five times.”
“What time’s he coming?”
“Ten.”
“Jesus, I’ll be asleep by then.”
“Not tonight, baby.”
“You could have checked with me,” Dirk said.
“You’d never say no to Everett.” She handed him the last dish and let the drain suck the water from the sink.
“Will you wait up for me?” he asked.
“I’d like to, but I don’t know.”
“Can I wake you?”
She smiled at him. “You’d better make it worth my while.”
• • •
HE FIXED HIMSELF a second vodka soda, careful with the proportions; he even sliced a small wedge of lime, then made a perpendicular cut and ran the meat of the lime around the edge of his glass. A second drink was a rare occurrence, usually saved for the cold-weather holidays, watching the Lions lose on Thanksgiving, or champagne on New Year’s, for him always the longest night of the year. Tomorrow wouldn’t start till noon, when he had to drive out to Novi to meet Miles, and he was backup tomorrow night on a stakeout, now that Collins’s wife was in labor. Dirk hated surveillance. The time-suck (as Michelle would say) nature of it, the utter boredom of watching criminals in their natural habitats.
Dirk heard Everett’s pickup park at the curb, and so he had the front door open as Everett walked up. Everett had become a stocky man; tonight he wore the Wayne State T-shirt that Dirk had given him. Everett seemed prouder of Dirk’s degree than Dirk did himself.
“Hey, man,” Everett said. Dirk responded with a hey, a handshake that was close, almost a chest bump, the way the football players did it nowadays. “Thanks,” Everett said, and they both understood for what: for seeing Everett on a Tuesday night, late, when they both ought to have been in bed.
“Marlon came home high yesterday,” Everett said once Dirk got him a Strohs and seated him in the living room.
Dirk nodded. No big surprise. Marlon, he suspected, would always be a worry, but he liked the kid, too, liked his spirit, the basic rebellion in him, whether it was sneaking out of the house when he was still in diapers or Crazy Gluing the mailbox shut on the day he expected his grades to show up.
“Michelle ever?” Everett asked, leaving off the words “smoke pot.”
“Not that I know of, but I might not always know. What did you do about Marlon?”
“I grounded him for a month, mostly ’cause I don’t know what else to do. He hates me.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he wasn’t smoking rocks, so I should relax.”
“The first part’s good news.”
“He said you can’t stop weed.”
“Might be true,” said Dirk.
“So I’m just supposed to let him be a pothead?”
“No,” Dirk said. He understood the frustration. His cell phone rang, the one the criminals called. Dirk looked at the number. It was Miles.
“It’s my job calling,” he explained to Everett.
Miles wanted Dirk to come to a party, then protested when Dirk declined. “It’s not personal,” Dirk said.
“And why we got to meet in Novi?” Miles asked. “Had to find it on a map. Nothing but white people out there.”
“So you should feel at home, on account of your mom.”
“You leave her out of this.”
“So don’t bring her,” Dirk said. Today he’d received the FBI file on Miles. Miles was his real name. He’d graduated from high school at Liggett School. He’d gotten a 3.5 his first two years in Ann Arbor, which meant he definitely knew where Novi was. With mandatory sentencing, he was going away for a while. It was going to be a pity.
More silence from Miles. Dirk could feel him calculating.
“You don’t trust me, don’t show up,” Dirk said. He hung up and smiled at Everett. “Sorry.”
“And I got cancer,” Everett said.
• • •
MILES DIDN’T SHOW. Dirk couldn’t believe it. He’d never lost someone so quickly.
He called downtown and then headed for Ev
erett’s, figuring he’d have that talk with Marlon now that he had three and a half hours till the stakeout. The talk was the first thing he’d promised Everett the night before. The second was that if Everett didn’t make it, Dirk would check in on Patrice, his wife. “That pension ain’t much, and she would only get half,” Everett said. The third request was Marlon. “He’s gonna need a father. If I ain’t around, that’s got to be you. I don’t know how else to say it.”
There was obvious symmetry to the request, but this occurred to Dirk only later. At this moment, he simply felt that it was right. He would have done anything for Everett, and welcomed the chance to do it. All the relationships he had with his blood relatives—his biological mother, his half-sisters—were hopelessly complicated, burdened with decisions made before he could reason, some before he was born. What he had with Everett was different.
“Whatever he needs,” Dirk promised. “It comes to that, it will be as if he’s my own.”
• • •
DIRK DROVE EVERETT’S street at a prowl, the black-tinted windows of his car lowered so Marlon could see him if Marlon happened to be on the street. These streets were working-class black, except for the odd Eastern European holdout who hadn’t fled with the rest of the white people twenty-five years ago. The whites here were Ukrainian, Polish, Belorussian, and Dirk found it odd that he even knew this. Come from Africa and you’re black. Come from Europe and they got it separated out by neighborhood.
Marlon was standing in the front yard when Dirk pulled in. There was another boy with him, and two others materialized by the time Dirk climbed out of the car.
“Hey, Marlon,” Dirk said. He was a skinny kid, which he must have gotten from Patrice’s family.
“Hey, Uncle Dirk.”
“Can we look inside?” asked one of the kids, peering in the car. The kid was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a white guy in mirrored shades pressing a .44 to a puppy’s head. Under the photo was a tag line that read, “Say Nice Things About Detroit.”
“What’s with the shirt?” Dirk asked.
“What you mean?”
“I don’t get it.”
“Like, say nice things about Detroit,” the kid said, “or the white dude shoots the dog.”
Dirk had to admit it was funny. He opened the passenger door and Marlon’s three friends stuck their heads inside the car. “A Blaupunkt,” said one. “Real leather,” said another, running his finger across the seat. Marlon hung back.
“What you pay for this?” asked one of the kids.
“It was free.”
“Free? No way.”
“Sure, got it from a drug dealer.”
They all looked at him. Probably they thought he was a drug dealer.
“Sure. You use a car in the commission of a crime, you forfeit the car. This baby now belongs to the U.S. government.”
“Why you got it?” asked the skinny one.
“I work for the government.”
“Yeah, you do,” said the chubby kid.
Dirk showed him the badge. “FBI.” At that the third kid took off running. The others just watched him go without amusement or surprise, as if this were something he did often. In the silence Dirk could feel the heat in the driveway. To Marlon he said, “Let’s you and me go for a ride.”
“I’m grounded. Can’t leave.”
Dirk went inside to find Patrice. He found her at the kitchen table, facing toward the back of the house, sitting, he realized, in front of two fans. “Hello, Dirk,” she said in that way she had, which, oddly enough, reminded him of his mother.
“How you been, Patrice?”
“Oh, you know. Everett says you’re going to talk some sense into Marlon.”
“Nothing Everett probably hasn’t said already. Sometimes it helps to hear it from another corner.”
“How’s that Michelle?”
“She’s good. Growing up, you know. Hardly recognize her sometimes when I come home.”
“You’re a lucky man, Dirk.”
“That’s true.”
“After you get done with Marlon, maybe you could talk to Everett, too.”
“What for?” Dirk asked.
“Because I know he’s sick, and I can’t very well help him if he won’t admit it.”
IV
THEY DROVE SOUTH. Marlon started to put his sneakers on the dash, the way he could in the pickup, and then thought better of it. This interior was sweet. Half a dozen cows must have died just to come up with all the leather. The thing was, it wasn’t really Dirk’s car. It was more of a loaner from the FBI. Renting a house was one thing, but a car was different. Marlon thought a man should really own his car, even if it wasn’t nice like this one. That way, he could always control where he was going.
They were driving on Gratiot, headed down to the Ren Cen. Marlon could see the towers, a white-gray, like the sky.
“Let’s ride the People Mover,” Dirk said.
“Why?” Marlon asked.
“Coleman Young built the thing, so somebody’s got to ride it. It’s your civic duty.”
They climbed the stairs and Dirk paid the fare. When the car moved, Marlon turned to the glass. There was something like a view from the train car, elevated above the street. He looked back to the river and Windsor, forward to Greektown, Tiger Stadium to the west, and the east side, where lots were going back to pasture and you could hear crickets on summer nights.
“Nice view, huh?”
“Man, you can see the whole world up here,” Marlon said.
“That’s why we’re here,” Dirk said. “I’m trying to lift your vision.”
He took Marlon to Greektown. It wasn’t really Detroit, it was like a theater for white people, but Marlon knew Dirk liked it because it was clean. White and black mixed on Monroe Street. Dirk stopped at a bakery.
“It’s baklava. Try it. It’s made with honey.”
Marlon took a bite. It was sweet and light and sticky. Also good. “This is all right,” he said.
“What’s this I hear, you’re smoking dope?” Dirk said.
Marlon should have known this was coming. His father had put Dirk up to it. “It ain’t nothing,” Marlon said. True enough. The true idiots did other things. From what Marlon could see, getting high harmed no one.
“It’s something, all right,” Dirk said. “You ever meet a pothead who did anything with his life?”
“It’s the crackheads that’s fucked up.”
“Watch your tongue with me,” Dirk said. “I’m not here for my health. I’m here for you. You’re thirteen, you’ve got all sorts of choices to make. But the choices you make now can stay with you your whole life.”
“Gotta decide now to be Mr. FBI?”
“Right now I’d like you to decide not to do drugs. We’ll build from there.”
“I know why my father sent you,” Marlon said.
“Why?”
“ ’Cause, like, what’s he gonna say? Be like me, work in a smelly steel plant they gonna close anyhow? Don’t get no education, drop outta high school?”
“Your father has a high school diploma.”
“GED,” Marlon said. Even the old man didn’t stick it out in high school. Dirk, of course, had a college degree, which meant that at this moment Marlon had to stand there and listen to him.
“You know,” Dirk said, “you do drugs, and I can bust you. And I will.”
“Hey, you the one with the big black Mercedes with the Blow Punk stereo and the subwoofer under the back seat. You just like playing Mr. Drug Dealer, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t,” Dirk said.
“You did.”
“I didn’t ask you, Marlon.”
“I’m just saying.”
Marlon could see he’d hit a chord. Not easy to do with Dirk. The man never got riled. He was cold and calculating, something he probably got from his white mother.
“I risk my life,” Dirk said, “to clean up the streets. I’m just saying I’d appreciate it if you
did your little part.”
“These streets ain’t never gonna be clean,” Marlon told him. “I’d rather have the car.”
2006
I
They drove to Palmer Woods, her mother silent in the passenger seat, staring blankly out the window. They were in the city limits now, but it was quite nice, streets lined with trees just starting to turn. Dirk had bought a house here on FBI pay. Now Shelly lived in it alone. Michelle was a journalist at a small paper in Texas. Why Texas Carolyn didn’t know, but she could guess: Texas was far away.
Shelly had invited them. She wanted to give Tina a photo album, dozens of pictures, all of them now digitally copied, printed, and placed in a leather-bound album. What a family, Carolyn thought, where a mother doesn’t have pictures of her son. Certainly there were no framed photos in the townhouse, and Carolyn didn’t remember any from their home. Dirk’s was a life hidden from sight.
Carolyn asked her mother why she hadn’t raised her son.
“The world today is different than it was then. I did what I thought was best for him.”
“By giving him away?”
Her mother turned from the window, looked at her. “You know nothing,” she said.
“I’m just asking, Mom. You sent your son to live with someone else. Why?”
“I am through talking about it.”
• • •
THE HOUSE WAS brick, elegantly laid out, with a turret at each end and a Tudor-style roof. The front door was wood and enormous. When Shelly swung it open she seemed small, though in fact she was just shy of six feet tall.
“Oh, I’m so glad you came,” Shelly said, as if she half expected that they wouldn’t. She led them to the living room, lined with bookcases, each book without its dust jacket. Shelly offered drinks.
“A vodka tonic,” Tina said.
It was two in the afternoon. What the hell, Carolyn thought.
“Make it two.”
Carolyn sat on the couch with her mother. They looked at the album, lying there on the table. Her mother made no move for the book. Carolyn was curious; her mother, she guessed, was fearful. Carolyn tried to imagine what it might be like to live here, among the long shadows and all those books without covers. It held a certain appeal. Sometimes in California she felt depressed by all the light.