by Bill Morris
After the dinner shift that night Bob Brewer gave Willie a ride home in his Deuce and a Quarter. The deeper they went into the city the more Willie noticed people pausing on the sidewalks to watch the big bronze boat float past. He could tell his uncle was digging the attention.
When Willie got home he was bone tired from the back-to-back double shifts, but he was too keyed up to sleep. He drank a beer and tried to watch “Mission: Impossible,” but his mind kept drifting. He’d made good progress on one half of his mission; now it was time to get started on the other half.
He went into the bedroom, where his Remington typewriter sat shrouded on the desk between a stack of untouched paper and his old college reading lamp, the one with the dented brown hood over the bulb. He’d brought the typewriter and lamp with him from Alabama because he thought they would provide some vital link to the world he was leaving behind, thought they would spur his memory, make the words flow. He thought wrong.
He set Chick Murphy’s business card on the desk—Stay on the right track to 9 Mile and Mack!—then he dug in the back of the closet and took out his Alabama box and set it on the bed. There was no doubt in his mind that the moment of his story’s conception—the moment when he heard the girl hiss de Lawd—was inside that box. He started removing the contents and placing them on the smooth green blanket.
First came the clothes—the white T-shirt, denim bib overalls and clunky brogan shoes. By 1962 this outfit had replaced sport coats and neckties as the unofficial Snick uniform, a way to blend in with the dirt-poor locals and look more like a “been-here” than a “come-here.” Most of the organizers were college kids or recent dropouts like Willie, well-read in the works of Fanon and Camus and other writers who meant absolutely nothing to a poor black sharecropper, a man who, as often as not, lived in a shack with a tarpaper roof and no running water, a number-three galvanized tub for baths, the interior walls papered with pages from an old Sears catalog. A house made of wood and wind. There would be pot-bellied children everywhere, flies, mangy dogs, clucking chickens. There would be an outhouse in the back yard, a clothesline and a vegetable patch, some ancient car hovering on cinderblocks awaiting repairs that would never come. The only book Willie ever saw in any of those houses was the Bible. The sameness of those places, the stupefying monotony—that, to Willie, was the killing thing about poverty.
He went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee because he sensed he was in for a long night. While the coffee brewed he put his new Gerry Mulligan-Dave Brubeck album on the stereo, turned down low. Then he took off his tuxedo pants and dress shirt and put on the T-shirt and overalls, still smelling of Duz detergent. He left the brogans unlaced. He had forgotten how good the clothes felt, so loose and free.
He removed an envelope full of black-and-white snapshots from the box. The first one showed Willie holding one of the rifles his brother had shipped to him, piece by piece, from Vietnam, a Remington 700 with a Unertl scope. Wes had snapped the picture one day when they were out in the piney woods near Tuskegee blasting away at Jax beer cans. Willie was wearing shades and smoking a cigarette, trying to look like a badass, but he looked exactly the way he’d always felt around guns: scared pissless.
There were dozens of pictures of Willie in his Snick uniform, mostly taken in Alabama and Mississippi. The pictures blurred together after a while, but one jumped out. It showed Willie talking to a sharecropper named Jess Hocutt in the swept-dirt yard beside his house near Indianola. Behind them was a Stutz Bearcat with no tires. It was always a good idea to go slow with country people, so by way of breaking the ice Willie had asked about the car. Jess had laughed, glad for the chance to talk about something other than the dreaded topic of registering to vote. The last thing Jess Hocutt needed, on top of the rest of his woes, was to bring down the wrath of the white man. It took Willie a whole week of day-long visits to persuade Jess to walk into the Sunflower County courthouse and tell the startled clerk that he wanted to register to vote. It was one of the hardest and most rewarding things Willie had ever done.
When he got to the last snapshot in the envelope, he felt his first shiver. It was a picture of him in his Snick uniform, standing by the reflecting pool during the March on Washington. To complete the bumpkin effect, he was wearing a straw hat. He was deep in conversation with another Snick volunteer, a beautiful brother from New York named Bob Moses who had memorized most of the Bible and dug Camus even more than Willie did—and Bob could read Camus in French. Playing a hunch, Willie opened his journal from the summer of ’63—the notebooks were dated and neatly bundled—and he soon found a long entry about the March, including this exchange with Bob Moses by the reflecting pool:
“Know what this is?” I asked Bob M.
“A couple hundred thousand freedom-high brothers and sisters is what this is,” he replied.
“Yeah, but this ain’t no March on Washington.”
“No? Then what is it?”
“This here’s the FARCE on Washington.”
Bob had guffawed. He knew Willie was mimicking Malcolm X, but he happened to agree with him—and a lot of other people who’d spent years in the trenches. Most Snick foot soldiers viewed the March as nothing more than a public relations stunt scripted by the Kennedys and the F.B.I., with Martin Luther King as their star house-nigger. Their star White House-nigger. Bob and Willie had come to Washington to picket the Justice Department and, almost as an afterthought, they went to the reflecting pool to hear John Lewis, the only speaker from Snick on the day’s program. John’s speech wasn’t bad, but when Willie learned later that the organizers had forced him to water it down, his disdain for the March grew even deeper.
Looking at the photograph of those people packed all the way to the Washington Monument, and remembering what he and Bob Moses had said, Willie realized he’d made his first small breakthrough. If he’d lost faith in King by the summer of ’63, then that meant the trap door had already opened and he had already begun to fall. He kept soldiering on for another year after the March, though he could see now that he was just going through the motions. It’s hard to admit you’re living a lie.
So now he knew that the moment he was looking for—the moment his disillusionment was born—had happened before the Farce on Washington. That still left him with a lot of ground to cover, a little more than three years’ worth, from early 1960 till the summer of ’63. But suddenly he felt hopeful. He refilled his coffee cup and took the rest of his journals and files out of the box and set them on the desk. He started digging through the stack in chronological order, beginning in early 1960.
He was still digging when he heard the first birds and looked up to see that the windows were blue. The night had begun with high hopes after he matched the picture of the Farce on Washington with the corresponding journal entry, but as the night wore on he realized the journals were spotty and thin. Sometimes he wrote dense pages about a night in jail, about the lurid, almost laughable epithets of the white hecklers, about the strange tickly sensation of sitting at a lunch counter and having a white man pour sugar on top of your head and feeling the granules trickle down inside the collar of your shirt. One notation read: Ketchup looks like blood on a starched white shirt. These were the kinds of details he could use. But then there would be gaps where he didn’t write a word for weeks.
Just before the sun came up, he finally had another breakthrough from an unexpected source: a newspaper clipping. Some of the people in the movement were crazy about collecting their press clippings, but Willie had never much cared for it even though he worked for a time in Snick’s press office. Most of the reporters and photographers he dealt with were white, and while many of them were sympathetic to the cause, a few even bright and crazy brave, he didn’t believe they could understand what the students were going through or tell their story straight.
But for some reason he’d saved the Atlanta Constitution from May 15, 1961. The badly yellowed front page was dominated by the now-famous photograph of a burning Greyhou
nd bus outside Anniston, Alabama. The photographer must have been crouching on the shoulder of the road. In the foreground a white man and a white woman are sitting on the ground, stunned and obviously in pain. Behind them two unidentified black men are looking at the bus, their backs to the camera. They’re looking at the open door of the bus with the S&H green stamps logo, at the sprinting dog that appears to be spewing smoke from its mouth, at the black smoke gushing out of the shattered windshield and the open side windows.
Willie remembered why he’d saved this newspaper: He was the unidentified black man on the far left.
Suddenly he could smell the noxious stench of burning rubber, feel the pain where his left pants’ leg had caught fire. He had nearly been burned alive inside that bus. As he studied the picture he even remembered the name of the black man standing beside him. It was Moses Newsome, a gutsy reporter with the Baltimore Afro-American who had sat next to Willie on the bus that day, interviewing him, asking him why he’d given up his snug berth at Tuskegee to join the movement. When Willie was in mid-sentence, the driver had pulled the bus off to the side of the road and vanished into the trees. Only then did Willie see the white mob closing in.
He stood up from the desk and snapped off the lamp. His neck and back were stiff, his vision foggy. He got a beer from the refrigerator and went out onto the screened-in porch where he liked to sleep when the nights got suffocating hot. Looking down at the street, watching the first people emerge from their homes and leave for work—a mechanic, a maid, several orderlies and nurses heading to Ford Hospital—he understood that he had learned something important during that long night: What he was looking for was not in his Alabama box, his personal record of the events he had lived through; it was in the recorded history of those events, things like the picture of the burning bus in the Atlanta newspaper.
He plopped into the overstuffed chair and propped his brogans on the railing. He was exhausted but happy. He marveled at the string of little things that had happened to him in the past week—a chance meeting with two strangers at a ballpark, a chance meeting with a car dealer, a ride in his uncle’s new Deuce, the discovery of a snapshot and a journal entry and a famous picture of a burning bus. It felt like a beginning.
He understood that he would have to go outside himself in order to see into himself. Oakland Hills was closed on Mondays, so he would catch a few hours of sleep and then walk over to the library on Woodward and start the monstrous job of scrolling through newspaper microfilm from early 1960 through the summer of 1963.
There was no doubt in his mind that the moment of conception he was looking for was hidden in a newspaper article or photograph, and he believed in his heart he was destined to find it. And once he found it, only one thing would be able to stop him: the Detroit police.
6
DOYLE SPENT THE MORNING IN HIS GARDEN, carefully selecting flowers for a bouquet. He wanted to wow Cecelia without looking like he was trying too hard. As he was on his way out the door a few minutes past eleven, his telephone rang. He considered ignoring it, but he put down the flowers and picked up the receiver. You never know.
It was Jimmy Robuck calling to say he wouldn’t be able to meet Frank at the ballpark, as they’d planned, because Walt Kanka had just called in a favor—and Jimmy had to go downtown to help him bang on Alphonso Johnson, the prime suspect in the murder of Carlo Smith, Vic #42. Though Doyle wanted to get off the phone, he listened while Jimmy gave him an elaborate play-by-play of what he had in mind for Alphonso. Just before he hung up, Jimmy said, “You don’t need no third wheel no how. Have fun. Hope you get lucky.”
“You too, Jimmy.”
As he rode the elevator to the twentieth floor in Cecelia’s building, Doyle checked his watch. Fifteen minutes late, already in the dog house before the first date had even begun. Story of my life, he thought, stepping off the elevator.
Cecelia’s door opened and she said, “You’re late.”
“I’m sorry . . . got a phone call from my partner as I was walking out the door . . . couldn’t get rid of him. . . . Brought you a little something.”
“For me?” she said, accepting the flowers. She needed both hands to hold the bouquet of black-eyed Susans, irises, snapdragons and pink peonies. From the look on her face, Doyle could tell he’d overdone it. Strike two before he got in the door.
While she was putting the flowers in a vase in the kitchen, Doyle walked straight to the picture window. He could see his reflection in the glass. He’d worn a sport coat with a houndstooth check over a green crew-neck sweater because Vicki Jones had told him the sweater picked up the green in his eyes. She wasn’t the first woman to tell him his eyes were his best feature. His jeans were faded, and his oxblood loafers, polished once a week, glowed like old wood.
Cecelia came back from the kitchen and joined him by the window. He was holding on to the windowsill because the altitude was making him dizzy. “That’s some view you’ve got,” he said. There were vistas to the east, south and west. He was pointing upriver, east. “Look, there’s Belcatraz!”
“That’s Belle Isle.”
“Yeah, but us cops call it Belcatraz. So many people got arrested during the riot that we ran out of places to put them. They wound up packed into the garage at headquarters, in school gyms, in fire stations, even in the bath houses at Belle Isle. Ergo, Belcatraz.”
“That’s the first time I’ve heard a cop say ergo.” She was smiling. Maybe he hadn’t overdone it with the flowers.
“It’s the Jesuits’ fault,” he said. “They made us study Latin and logic.” Now he was pointing west, toward downtown. “There’s headquarters—it looks so puny from way up here! And the Frank Murphy courthouse. And Greektown—I can almost smell the garlic. You can even see the poor man’s Golden Gate.”
“Is that what cops call the Ambassador Bridge?”
“No, that’s just me. I spent a week in San Francisco last year—best food I ever ate. Every time I look at the Ambassador Bridge now I think of the Golden Gate, and every time I see Belle Isle I think of Alcatraz.”
“Speaking of food, it’s almost ready. Would you like a cup of coffee or—I’m having a Bloody Mary.”
“Bloody Mary sounds good.”
“Hope you like ’em spicy.”
“I like everything spicy.”
When she came back with the drinks, he was sitting on the chocolate-colored sofa studying the décor of this beige cocoon like it smelled bad.
“What’s the matter, don’t like the furniture?” she said, handing him his drink.
“No, no, no. . . .”
“Don’t worry. I’m going to redecorate, get rid of all this brown crap and chrome. Place feels like a cheesy nightclub. But I had to wait for the settlement to come through.”
“The settlement?” Here we go, he thought.
She clicked her glass against his. “Here’s to my divorce.”
“To your divorce.” He held the celery stalk aside with his index finger and took a drink. He closed his eyes when he swallowed.
“You like it?” she said.
He could hear the anxiety in her voice. “No, I don’t like it, I love it,” he said. “The cracked pepper, the horseradish, the Worcestershire sauce. It’s perfect.” He took another drink. “So. You were married.”
“For two years. The settlement finally came through last week. Now I get to pay the rent on this groovy pad all by myself.” She waved at the room. “This is Ronnie’s idea of class. You’ve really got to wonder about a guy whose favorite color is brown and who’s got more chrome in his living room than he’s got on his car.”
“So what happened to the marriage?”
He was afraid he was pushing too hard, but she didn’t hesitate. “For starters, I married him for all the wrong reasons. I’d just gotten back from New York, my dream of making it as an artist all shot to hell, like I told you. I was a mess. We met at a wedding—and when he asked me to dance, that was it. Guy’s a great dancer. Four months later we
were at another wedding. Ours.”
“Then you moved here?”
“No, we lived in an apartment in Warren for a while so he could be close to work—he worked as a stylist at the G.M. Tech Center. Mostly did dashboards and door handles. We moved down here last year because Ronnie wanted to be where the action is. He actually said things like that with a straight face. He talked me into dying my hair that tacky blonde color. He started staying out later and later and got into drugs and eventually lost his job at G.M. Last I heard he was selling auto parts in Ecorse. Or maybe it’s Wyandotte.”
“So what does he drive?”
“Hunh?”
“You said there’s more chrome in this room than there is on his car. You can tell a lot about a man in Detroit by the car he drives.”
“Oh. It’s bright yellow, an Oldsmobile 4-4-something. Loud as hell, and fast. One of Ronnie’s favorite expressions was You can tell the men from the boys by the size of their toys. What a complete jerk.” She sipped her drink. “So how about you?”
“I’ve never been married—or divorced.”
“No, I meant what do you drive?”
“Oh. A baby-shit green ’61 Pontiac Bonneville with a hundred and twenty thousand on the odometer. I love that old thing. You?”
“I just bought a blue Mustang convertible. First new car I’ve ever owned. I love that new thing.”
With marital status and cars out of the way, they were quiet for a while. Frank cocked an ear, picking up the music. She’d put on a Chopin record with the volume way down. “I could change the music if you like,” she said.
“No, no, this is nice.”
“I like to listen to classical on Sunday—it’s so soothing. But I’ve got plenty of Motown. Or I could put on the new Creedence album if you’re into rock—”
“No, please. I love Chopin.” A shower of snowflakes washed over them. “Isn’t that Scherzo No. 3?”