Motor City Burning

by Bill Morris

  “Sure thing.”

  When Doyle got back to the booth Cecelia said, “What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit. You look like your dog just died. What’d he say to you?”

  “Just shop talk. Let’s drop it. Work’ll be there when I show up tomorrow. Finish telling me the story about how your parents met.”

  Walt Kanka sent a round of drinks to the table and Doyle tried to pay attention as Cecelia resumed a familiar Detroit tale, one she’d started telling back at the ballpark, about her mother’s parents coming from Czechoslovakia and settling in Hamtramck, her mother working as a key punch operator and meeting Tommy Cronin, an Irishman from the West Side, a salesman with friends all over town and money to burn. . . .

  But Doyle only caught scraps of the story. Walt Kanka had broken the spell with his bad good news. When the band took a break, Benny Anflick came over to the booth to squeeze Doyle’s shoulder and offer his trademark greeting, “How ya doin, babe?”

  Babe. When Benny finally drifted away, Doyle put a $10 bill under his empty glass and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  It was dark now, and though the two black guys were gone and the night was starry and soft, Cecelia locked her door without having to be reminded. They didn’t say much during the drive back to her place. When Doyle pulled into the parking lot on East Lafayette, she invited him up for a nightcap.

  “Thanks,” he said, “but I’d better be getting home.”

  “Relax. I’m not asking you to spend the night. I’ve still got a paper to finish writing, in case you forgot.”

  Seen from the twentieth floor at night, Detroit was astonishingly beautiful, diamond spokes radiating through skewed grids, an orderly world where no harm could possibly come to any man. A freighter with the blue Ford oval on its smokestack was gliding downriver, riding low in the water, its belly swollen with iron ore taken on in Duluth, Minnesota. The ore would be off-loaded at the Rouge, where Doyle’s father worked for thirty-five years, and where he died.

  Cecelia poured a snifter of Drambuie for Doyle and a cup of coffee for herself and they sat by the window, admiring the river and the lights. They drank in silence, holding hands, both of them happy that the day’s earlier ease had returned. After a long while she said, “So you still don’t want to talk about what your buddy had to say back at the club?”

  “He’s not my buddy. And no, this is too nice.”

  She didn’t press, and he was grateful for that. Vicki Jones never stopped peppering him with questions when he got home from work. He still wasn’t sure which she hated more—the hours he kept or his refusal to answer her questions.

  “But tell me one thing,” Cecelia said.

  “Sure.”

  “Tell me you don’t really approve of the way those Chaldean guys deal with things.”

  “No, of course I don’t. It’s just that sometimes this job makes me feel like we’re losing the war.”

  “And this is one of those times?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure yet.”

  At the door he kissed her goodnight, a long kiss that hinted at things to come. Driving home, he could taste her lipstick, could hear her whistling like a sailor when Al Kaline drilled a home run into the upper-deck porch in right field. But as sweet as those memories were, by the time he reached his house they were crowded out by the knowledge that Helen Hull’s murder was now the only one still unsolved from the riot. That meant the hot seat was hotter than ever. It was time to go talk to that Armstrong woman.

  7

  AFTER THE LONG NIGHT WHEN HE UNEARTHED THE PICTURES OF the Farce on Washington and the burning bus outside Anniston, Willie’s life took on a sense of purpose and urgency it had lacked for years. He spent his free days in the microfilm room at the Detroit Public Library, methodically reading back issues of the Free Press, the Michigan Chronicle and the New York Times, beginning in January of 1960. He made photocopies of important articles and pictures, took copious notes. If he had to work a night shift at Oakland Hills, he slipped on his Snick uniform as soon as he got home and worked into the small hours at his desk, combing through the contents of his Alabama box. The harder he worked, the more energy he had and the less sleep he needed. Like his mother used to say, if you need to get a job done, give it to a busy man. He even found time to catch a few Tigers games.

  Late one Saturday night Willie sat at his desk, his only companions the distant purr of the Lodge Freeway and the burble of Miles Davis’s trumpet. He had just found something near the bottom of his Alabama box—a dozen neatly typed, single-spaced pages held together by a paper clip. It was the outline of the first three chapters of his book, written in Tuskegee after his return from Atlantic City in the fall of 1964. His plan was to write a memoir of his time in the movement, a foot soldier’s intimate story. The only thing he knew about the book’s title was that it would contain the word whirlwind.

  He had worked on the book steadily until his departure for Detroit in the spring of 1967, yet all he had to show for two and a half years of toil was these dozen pages. He read them with a rising sense of dismay. Chapter One, “Wake-Up Call,” was to tell the story of the day when, at the age of nine or ten, he walked into the Andalusia Public Library and asked for a library card and the white librarian, Mrs. Satterfield, told him, almost sadly, “I’m sorry, young man, but Nigras aren’t allowed to check out books.” Those were her exact words, and he would remember them as long as he lived. It was the first time he saw that white people saw him as different—that is, inferior. It was his baptism, the wake-up call that comes sooner or later to every black person in America. Chapter Two, “First Feud,” was to tell the story of the first time his parents argued in his presence—over Rev. Martin Luther King’s radio address supporting the Montgomery bus boycott. “Foolishness!” Willie’s father had roared at the radio. His mother disagreed: “Bout time somebody in a pulpit talked about the here and now instead of all that pie in the sky in the bye-and-bye.” And Chapter Three, “Taking Leave,” was to tell the story of Willie’s decision to leave Tuskegee Institute and walk into the whirlwind.

  A dozen skimpy pages and then—nothing. Not a single scrap of flesh on the bones of that outline. Not a single page of prose despite all the notes and pictures and clippings inside the Alabama box. Why? Why had that pathetic trickle of words dried up?

  He gazed out the window, listened to the traffic and the trumpet and the whisper of the trees. He started walking through those two and a half years in Tuskegee, trying to remember how a project begun with such high energy and high hopes could sputter, stall, and die.

  He remembered that in Tuskegee he’d tried to take inventory of all the jails he’d been in, the beatings he’d absorbed, the fire-bombings he’d survived. But he couldn’t do it. His concentration and his memory were shot. He was having trouble falling asleep, and when he did sleep he had wicked nightmares. A car back-firing on the street made him jump. After finishing the outline of Chapter Three, he simply didn’t have the strength to start Chapter Four. A sense of paralysis came over him. Then panic.

  And then his brother came back into his life.

  Wes materialized on Willie’s front porch on a rainy night in the fall of 1966, dripping like a dog. Willie was shocked that the chiseled killing machine had allowed himself to get fat and sloppy. Wes said he’d come to claim the pieces of the guns he’d been mailing from Saigon, but instead of picking up the stuff and leaving town, he installed himself on the sofa in Willie’s living room and proceeded to spend the winter watching TV, drinking beer, eating pork rinds and fried-oyster po’ boys. He roared at the morons on “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Gilligan’s Island,” he bit his fingernails during “The Wild, Wild West,” and, unable to sleep, he stayed up late watching re-runs of Alfred Hitchcock and “The Twilight Zone.” On Saturday mornings he watched cartoons with the rapt glee of a child.

  Willie, meanwhile, went into his bedroom and closed the door and tried to keep working on h
is book. But the drone of the TV and his brother’s laughter made it impossible for him to move beyond those dozen skimpy pages. He was still having trouble sleeping, and on many of those long nights he could hear his brother screaming as he sprang off the sofa, drenched from another jungle nightmare.

  Now Willie understood that he and Wes had been crushed by the same thing. Some people called it shell shock, or battle fatigue, or stress. Willie thought of it as something else: the violent dismantling of the belief that it was possible to make a better world.

  Their only relief came on the rare days when Wes rose from the sofa and loaded the trunk of Willie’s ’54 Buick with guns and ammunition and they rode out into the country together for a little target practice. Blasting away at Jax beer cans was the only time they were both engaged in the moment, able to concentrate, free of the numbness and the nightmares from their very different but very similar wars. It was the only time they were both fully alive. But by then Willie’s book was graveyard dead.

  He awoke in his desk chair at dawn. The Miles Davis record was spinning silently on the turntable. He showered and shaved and walked the four blocks to Twelfth Street to buy a Free Press from Aziz, the Syrian who ran the corner newsstand.

  “Good news and bad news today,” Aziz said, taking Willie’s dollar.

  “We lost.”

  “Yes, by a score of 8 and 4 to the Senators of Washington. Lolich does not look so sharp. But still we are in first place!”

  “Got a double-header today.”

  “Two games for the price of one. A most excellent idea.”

  “I’m going to the park, Aziz. Want to come along?”

  He gave Willie a look like he’d lost his mind, but there was a smile behind it. “Mister Willie, if I go to the ballgame, how do I sell my papers? How do I pay my rent, huh?”

  “Well, maybe we’ll go to a night game sometime. After you’ve closed for the day.”

  “That I would very much like.” He handed Willie his change. “Enjoy the games. Tonight I maybe will see you at the Chit Chat?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  On his way home, Willie realized why he felt so fresh after just a couple of hours of sleep in the desk chair. It was because he was buoyed by the revelation that had come to him in the night. He and his brother were bound by shared suffering. They were both damaged warriors. That didn’t excuse or guarantee anything, but it did give him hope that his damage was a way back into his story. For the first time, he understood that his story was not a civil rights story. It was a war story.

  He was ravenous and when he got home he fixed a big breakfast of ham and eggs, grits, toast and coffee. As he ate he read the sports page closely, the accounts of yesterday’s loss, the box score, Joe Falls’s column, stories of injuries and slumps and hitting streaks. He couldn’t get enough news about the Tigers.

  After breakfast he tucked the newspaper under his arm and walked to Woodward and caught the DSR bus. As the bus rattled toward downtown he glanced at the front page. Same old same old. Eugene McCarthy’s dark-horse presidential campaign still gaining momentum, the Vietnam war still dragging on, the Paris peace talks still going nowhere. The only thing that held his interest was a story at the bottom of the page that said H. Rap Brown, Stokely’s successor as the head of Snick, was on trial in New Orleans for carrying an M-1 carbine across state lines.

  Willie needed to believe he was different from H. Rap Brown. Willie did not let his brother talk him into driving those guns to Detroit because he shared Rap’s enthusiasm for the looming race war. By then Willie was beyond caring whether a race war was inevitable, desirable, unthinkable, or merely the fantasy of a bunch of fanatics with big mouths and a few loose screws. He agreed to make the trip because he needed the money and he needed a change of scenery. He also needed to believe he was disengaged, above the fray, a mere mercenary. Now he was working to revive his book project not because he believed it was possible to change other people. He was doing it for a much simpler and, he thought, purer reason: because he did not want to remain invisible and he did not want his life to be pointless.

  “Hey, you there! In the back!”

  Willie looked up. The bus had reached downtown and the driver was eyeing him nervously in the rearview mirror. There was no one else on the bus.

  “You deaf? I said last stop! Everybody off!”

  Willie left the newspaper on the bus. He studied his scuffed brogans as he walked, and he realized his Snick uniform fit his mood perfectly. It was faceless, generic, ideal for a man trapped in that gray no-man’s-land between the black world and the white world. Part of that gray area was his predicament—the small-town southern Negro marooned in a sprawling northern factory town, the once-proud idealist reduced to working a lowly job for The Man while worrying about the police. All that was predictable and bad enough. What made it worse was that he had nowhere to turn for refuge. The movement had proven to be a sad joke. Religion had never been an option. Other than a few beers at the Chit Chat after a Tigers game, the conventional pleasures no longer held any allure. He didn’t miss the sweaty fury of the dance floor or the fuzzy buzz of a Thai stick. He’d never gotten a kick from gambling. His brother had hit the road—and may have wound up in a ditch. And working with some hard-core Stepin Fetchits at Oakland Hills had reminded Willie that he had no need whatsoever for the white man’s approval or largess. He had nowhere to turn, and no one to turn to.

  As he joined the line at the ballpark ticket window, Willie wondered if this no-man’s-land might not be the perfect place for him to be right now. Maybe it was best that he had nowhere to turn. Like Ralph Ellison’s invisible man—like all men—he had no choice but to look within himself. And thanks to the picture of the burning bus and the typed outline of his first three chapters and the revelation about war that had come to him last night—looking within himself was what he was finally beginning to do.

  He bought a ticket for the bleachers and began the ascent into the familiar symphony of smells. Loudspeakers carried the pre-game show. As the city streets receded beneath him, Willie felt himself getting lighter, airier, escaping from a world of worry into a carefree world of pure play. Walking along the gangplank that led to the bleachers, he caught sight of the rectangle of sky up ahead. Again he saw seagulls, and his pulse quickened. Then he stepped into a green bowl of sunlight.

  He told himself that maybe this was his new home and refuge: this feeling of release he got when he came to this magical place.

  To his delight, Louis Dumars and Clyde Holland were sitting right where they’d been on Opening Day. “Well, well, well,” Louis called when he saw Willie coming up the steps. “Look who’s back. If it ain’t Mo-fuckin-beel, Ala-goddam-bama!”

  They smacked palms. Clyde repeated the greeting, then looked Willie up and down and said, “Where you pick up them vines, boy? Some watermelon patch?”

  “No,” Willie said, strangely pleased by the teasing. “This is what we use to wear when I worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee down South a few years back. You know, Snick. It’s helping me remember things.”

  “Student nonviolence my ass,” Clyde said with a laugh. “You looks like a motherfuckin hick.”

  Clyde did not look like a hick. In his expensive sunglasses, colorful dashiki, creased slacks and sandals, he looked like what he was—a prosperous black man enjoying his day of leisure.

  Earl Wilson was pitching again for the Tigers, and he took a 4-0 lead into the eighth inning. After getting one out he gave up a single and a walk, and Mayo Smith replaced him with John Warden. This time there were no boos as Wilson walked slowly off the field, his head held high. The man, Willie thought, had a long ton of poise and dignity. Louis and Clyde and Willie stood to join the cheering. Wilson tipped his cap before vanishing into the dugout.

  Warden promptly gave up a walk and a grand slam and just like that the score was tied and the joy was gone and the stadium was roiling with anger.

  “Dig a hole, Warden!�
�� someone shouted.

  “Yank the bum!”

  “Like I say,” Clyde said, shaking his head, “ficklest motherfuckers in the world.”

  Fred Lasher replaced Warden and promptly put the fire out. In the bottom of the ninth inning Gates Brown drove in the winning run with a pinch-hit single to left field, and the place erupted. John Warden’s sins were already forgotten.

  “Didn’t I tell you Gates the best pinch-hitter in the game?” Louis exulted, accepting hand slaps from Clyde and half a dozen delirious strangers.

  In the lull between games, Willie went exploring and returned to the bleachers with three cups of beer and a bag of peanuts in a cardboard tray just as Clyde was saying, “Alphonso done fucked up.”

  “Who’s Alphonso?” Louis asked, thanking Willie for the beer.

  “Remember on Opening Day when I tole you bout a client a mine name of Alphonso Johnson got picked up by the po-lice for questioning on a murder during the riot?” Louis and Willie nodded. “Well, turns out the po-lice got a tip, and while they had Alphonso downtown they tore up his crib. Found his gun and claimed they matched it to the bullet they took out some dude’s head who died during the riot, some fireman. It was a lie, a course, but suddenly dumbass Alphonso believes he’s in a world a shit.”

  “So what happened?” Willie said. There was a roaring in his ears.

  “I’m not all the way sure,” Clyde said. “What I do know is he signed a confession—after I tole him not to say a word less I was in the room with him!”

  “You and me both know the po-lice done beat it outta him,” Louis said.

  All Willie could think about was how grateful he was that there were no more guns in his car or anywhere near his apartment. He tried to remember what Wes had done with those last three guns before leaving for Chicago, but he couldn’t.

  Once the second game started, Willie managed to quit worrying about the guns and the police. The day was too fair—soft sunshine, bleached white clouds marching across the sky. Gates Brown started in left field for Willie Horton, an acceptable substitution in Willie’s eyes, but he was disappointed that Ed Mathews was inserted for Norm Cash at first base. Willie had played first base in high school and at Tuskegee, and he was developing great respect for Cash’s fielding and hitting. It was hard to argue with the results, though. Mathews smashed a three-run homer in the fourth inning and Al Kaline added a two-run shot in the sixth.