Motor City Burning

by Bill Morris

  Kindu had served in the First Cav in Vietnam and he was wearing his uniform to prove it—combat boots, dog tags, and the yellow shoulder patch with the black diagonal bar and the black horse’s head. At least he knew guns. He wanted an M-16 and was disappointed to learn that all Wes had left was a pair of AK-47s, clunky Russian guns which, Wes assured him, would do in a pinch. Wes and Kindu chatted about banana clips, hollow points, hand loads and a lot of other things that meant nothing to Willie. He was nervous as a kitten, afraid of getting busted during their very last sale, the way the world worked.

  When they finally closed the deal, Wes decided to stick around and celebrate by sampling some of Kindu’s Thai reefer and Bali Hai wine. It had taken just three days to unload that trunkload of guns—all but the three Wes had stashed between his mattresses at the Algiers Motel and planned to keep for his “personal use.” He was flush, feeling good, ready to party. Willie begged off, said he was going to see Edwin Starr at the Twenty Grand that night and needed to swing by the Algiers and get cleaned up. In truth he just wanted to get far far away from that diaper smell and those guns and those two crazy niggers.

  “Turn that up!” Louis suddenly cried.

  Clyde had cut over to Woodward and they were passing between those two blocks of chiseled ice, the Public Library and the Institute of Arts, just as Otis Redding was bending into the whistling part on “Dock of the Bay.” Suddenly Willie was whistling along with Otis and Louis and Clyde, whistling as hard as he knew how, whistling until Edgar Vaughan and Kindu finally left him in peace. He even managed to forget the close call when that white cop had pulled him over right after he left Kindu’s apartment.

  Clyde docked the Buick in front of a place called the Seven Seas. As he climbed out, Willie looked across the street and was surprised to see his very first home-away-from-home in the Motor City, the Algiers Motel, where his brother had nearly become a statistic. Only then did Willie notice the sign. The familiar neon palm tree was still there, but they’d changed the name. The Algiers Motel was now the Desert Inn. Willie laughed out loud at this, at the vanity of believing it was possible to erase a disgrace by changing its name.

  “The fuck you laughin at?” Louis asked, following Willie’s gaze across the street.

  “That’s where my brother and I stayed when we first got to town last spring.”

  “Why’s that so funny?”

  “They changed the name.”

  “I seen that. Place is a shit hole no matter what they call it. You wasn’t staying there during the riot, was you?”

  “No, I’d moved out by then. Me and my brother both.”

  “Lucky for you, son. Come on. Clyde wants to introduce you to somebody.”

  16

  CECELIA CRONIN WAS STANDING IN HER BEDROOM DOORWAY drinking her third cup of coffee when Doyle’s eyes finally popped open. It was past noon. From the way he looked around the room, sort of panicky, she could tell he didn’t know where he was.

  She said, “Coffee? Aspirin? Gun?”

  He turned his head slowly, surprised to see her standing there. He said “Hi” in a small voice, like it hurt to talk.

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “Aspirin,” he croaked. “Water.”

  She brought him a glass of ice water and three aspirins and sat on the edge of the bed. Propped on one elbow, he swallowed the aspirins and thanked her. “Whew,” he said, handing her the glass and returning his head gingerly to the pillow. “What ran over me?”

  “Stroh’s and John Jameson. I’ve never seen anything like it. You were fine one minute—telling me a hilarious story about a phone conversation you had with some redneck cop in Alabama—and the next minute two busboys were helping me pour you into my car.”

  “So you drove me here from the Riverboat?”

  “I wasn’t about to let you drive.”

  “And this is . . . your bedroom?”

  “Correct.”

  “Jesus. I’m sorry. . . .”

  “No need to apologize. You do a great southern accent. But there’s something I gotta tell you, Detective Doyle.”

  He frowned.

  “You snore like a chainsaw when you’re drunk. I finally had to go sleep on the sofa.” She laughed and brushed the hair off his forehead. His frown disappeared. “You poor thing. You think a Bloody Mary might help?”

  “You got any Vernor’s?”

  Half an hour later Doyle was halfway through his second can of Vernor’s ginger ale and his first cup of coffee, sitting at the glass-topped table in the dining nook with his back to the big blue sky. He had no interest in how pretty Windsor, Ontario, looked this morning.

  After he got down a soft-boiled egg and two pieces of toast, Cecelia said, “You got plans for the day?”

  “I was thinking I might swing by Detroit Receiving for a blood transfusion.”

  “I’ve got a better idea.”

  An hour later they were on a bench in the Garden Court at the Institute of Arts, gazing wordlessly at Diego Rivera’s “Detroit Industry” frescoes. Frank was lying on his back, using Cecelia’s left thigh as a pillow. He looked content lying there, like he might actually survive this day.

  They were surrounded on all four sides by frescoes that depicted the entire cycle of human life in the industrial age, from the germination of a cell to the brutal act of turning minerals into machines. The cycle began with an infant (or was it a fetus?) cradled in the bulb of a plant, and there were female nudes holding fruit and sheaves of wheat, then airplanes and birds, boats and fish mushrooming into immense portraits of how man uses the natural world to feed his technology: animals whose blood is turned into serum for vaccines, minerals being heated and poured to make poison gas and V-8 engines, a world of blast furnaces and paint ovens and smokestacks, a roaring inferno where men stamp, hone, deburr, hammer and curse cars into being.

  They studied the frescoes for a long time without speaking. It was Doyle who broke the silence. “You never told me—how’d your paper about the Cubists turn out?”

  “Pretty well, actually.”

  “Did you mention Rivera?”

  “Just briefly. The time he spent in Paris with Picasso and Juan Gris. Mainly I concentrated on Orozco and Siquieros. But I’ve got bigger news.”

  “Oh?”

  “My thesis proposal just got accepted. I’m going to write about the Monuments Men, you know, the Roberts Commission, the guys who cataloged and returned artwork the Nazis looted during the war.”

  “There was a ton of stuff, wasn’t there?”

  “The Nazis looted so much art that they had to store it in caves and mines.”

  “How’d you get into that?”

  “My thesis advisor was on the Roberts Commission before he came to teach at Wayne State. While he was doing some provenance research he learned that a Monet in this museum’s permanent collection had been looted by the Nazis. He saw to it that it got returned to its rightful owners, a Jewish family in France. It was the first time an American museum’s ever done that.”

  “Good for the D.I.A. That’s very cool.”

  “I think so too. I’ve decided to go into provenance research after I get my degree. My advisor believes it’s going to be the wave of the future.”

  They were quiet again, gazing at the frescoes, neither of them feeling pressure to make small talk. Again it was Doyle who broke the silence. “You know this whole thing’s a lie, don’t you?”

  “What is?”

  He waved at the frescoes. “Those beautiful earth tones. Those workers who look like dancers. All that noble toil. It’s all bullshit!”

  Several people turned in their direction.

  “Down boy,” Cecelia said, stroking his hair.

  He lowered his voice. “In a real car plant all the men are thick and muscular and everything’s black and white and gray, even the people. Especially the people. It was like we were being covered with metal shavings, turned from black men and white men into gray men. The only color I
remember was orange. Usually the sparks were white, but every once in a while they were orange for some reason. I remember thinking those orange sparks were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Probably because everything else was so ugly.”

  “You worked on the line?”

  He told her about his brief career attaching leaf springs at Chevy Gear & Axle the summer after his junior year of high school. On his third day he saw a defective drop forge slice off a man’s left hand cleanly at the wrist. The blood came out like water out of a garden hose. Fifteen minutes later, after a cursory inspection by some foremen, another man was running the forge. Doyle walked out of the place and never went back. Then he told Cecelia about how his father’s forty-two-year career at the Rouge came to an abrupt end six weeks before his retirement—the meatloaf sandwich, the heart attack.

  Doyle said, “Notice how everyone on these walls is looking down, everyone except the overseers and the foremen? That’s the one thing Rivera got right. My father wound up just like that, could barely lift his head enough to look you in the eye. The older he got, the more he shrank. I think he would’ve disappeared completely if he’d lived much longer.”

  “You come here a lot?”

  “Every chance I get.”

  “I don’t understand. If you hate these frescoes so much, if they make you so angry, why do you keep coming back? You some kind of masochist?”

  “No, I come here for two reasons. Because I do think the frescoes are beautiful, and because I never want to forget what the Henry Fords of this world do to men like my father, the way they get rich by grinding human beings into dust. The prettiest art in the world can’t hide that fact.”

  “I’m no head shrinker, but it sounds to me like you’re as mad at Rivera as you are at Henry Ford.”

  He chuckled. “I never thought of it that way, but I guess I do blame Rivera. Henry was just doing what industrialists do—the same way fish swim and birds fly. I’m inclined to give the devil his due. The man was an anti-Semite and a crank, but he was also a genius and at least he was pure about being evil. But Rivera—what a fraud.”

  “Did you know he was all gung-ho for the Mexican revolution—but he was nowhere near Mexico while it was happening. He was in Paris.”

  “I didn’t know that, but I’m not surprised.”

  “Know how much he got paid for this job?”

  “Five grand?”

  “Try twenty. A small fortune in 1932.”

  “Where’d the money come from?”

  “Edsel Ford’s bottomless pockets.” She pointed at a little man in a suit and tie in the bottom right corner of the large mural on the south wall. “That’s Edsel, Henry’s son. When the murals were unveiled to the public in ’33, a lot of people in Detroit thought they should be white-washed—they thought the nudes were pornographic and the vaccination panels were sacrilegious. But old Edsel stood his ground, and the murals survived. And look at that small panel just below Edsel. It shows Rouge workers getting paid from the company’s armored truck and crossing the Miller Road overpass to the employee parking lots. That’s the famous overpass where Walter Reuther and his union organizers wound up getting stomped by Harry Bennett’s goons in ’38.”

  “The Battle of the Overpass. My father was working there when it happened. He said the union guys had it coming. He actually bought the company line that the organizers were a bunch of Jews and Commies. He thought Harry Bennett was a great man, and of course he thought old Henry walked on water.”

  “Who turned you on to this place?”

  “My mother brought my brother and me here every chance she got. She loved it all—the medieval armor, the Morris Louis paintings, these frescoes.”

  “Was your mother an artist?”

  “No, she was a housewife with a high school education who loved to cook and loved beautiful things. But she wasn’t a snob. Much as she loved Rivera, she worshiped Frank Sinatra. Her favorite thing in the world was cooking while listening to Old Blue Eyes. Her name was Dolores—her maiden name was Carbucci—and when Sinatra would sing I was made to serenade Dolores, serenade her chorus after chorus, my mother would squeal, ‘Listen, Frankie, he’s singing about me!’” Doyle smiled at the memory. “You want to hear a little secret?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You may not believe this, but my mother actually named me after Sinatra. My full name’s Francis Albert, same as his.”

  “Did your father come here a lot too?”

  “Yeah, he used to spend hours in here on Saturday afternoons, just staring at these walls. He said the frescoes made him feel like what he did during the week was worthwhile, gave his work dignity. The poor deluded bastard. He actually bought the bill of goods Ford and Rivera were selling.”

  “Well, at least these frescoes made his life more bearable. That’s something.” Like father, like son, she was thinking.

  “Yeah, I suppose so. Whatever gets you through the day.”

  They lapsed back into silence. After a while she said, “First Chopin, now Diego Rivera and Frank Sinatra. What’s the next surprise, Francis Albert Doyle?”

  “Why shouldn’t I know a few things about music and art? Like I said before, I hate all the assumptions people make about each other—cops can’t love art, artists can’t commit crimes, black guys can’t be brain surgeons, white guys can’t play basketball.”

  “Can you?”

  “Can I what?”

  “Play basketball?”

  “Once upon a time. I led the city in rebounding my junior year.”

  “What about your senior year?”

  “I blew out my left knee during the Catholic Central game—along with my shot at a scholarship to Michigan. I can predict rain now better than the weatherman on Channel 7.”

  “Anybody can do that.”

  They laughed. Then she tugged him to his feet and said, “Come on, let’s go outside and get some fresh air.”

  They sat on the museum’s white marble steps and looked across Woodward at the Public Library, its mass and elegance, another monumental building that had always made Doyle proud to be a Detroiter. He put his arm around her shoulder and they watched the traffic flowing up and down Woodward, watched the sun sink toward the library. There was no need to talk.

  A big red convertible sailed past, three black guys in it with the radio blasting, sending music trailing in its wake like smoke: Sittin here restin my bones—and this loneliness won’t leave me alone . . .

  “Looks like fun,” Doyle said.

  “What looks like fun?”

  “Riding around on a sunny afternoon in a convertible listening to Otis Redding.”

  “I’m having fun sitting here listening to you.”

  “Yeah, same here. This is nice.”

  “I loved hearing your stories about your mother and father coming here, and your job at Chevy Gear & Axle, and how your father died. I wish you’d been open like that last night.”

  “Last night?”

  “When you started to tell me about that lady in Alabama, on the way to my place. Beulah something.”

  “Jesus Christ. I told you about Beulah Bledsoe?”

  “You started to—you said she was making you hate yourself. When I asked why, you clammed up. It reminded me of that night when we were at the Drome and you saw that guy from work, that detective, in the men’s room. Boy, when you shut down you really shut down. You let me in so close and then, I don’t know, you just slam the door in my face. And then all of a sudden you’re so far away. Detached, like. I gotta tell you, it’s awful.”

  “Detachment’s what keeps homicide cops alive. What am I supposed to do? Come in at three in the morning and tell you how pathetic those two stiffs looked in that lake of blood outside the Driftwood Lounge? No, it’s better to keep the two worlds separate. My partner’s always telling me there’s no way around it and there never will be.”

  “You believe him?”

  “I’m afraid I do.”

  She knew it was
unwise, but she said, “So who’s this Beulah Bledsoe?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Well I don’t want to talk about her.”

  “Why not? You sure wanted to talk about her last night.”

  “That was John Jameson talking.”

  “In vino veritas.”

  “I’ve never believed that shit.”

  “I’ve always believed it.”

  “Well, I can’t tell you about Beulah Bledsoe.”

  “How come?”

  “Because she’s part of an ongoing investigation. I’m not allowed to talk about her. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it works.”

  It sounded like a canned defense, but she didn’t press him. “I’m sorry, Frank. I shouldn’t pry. . . .”

  “You don’t got to apologize. I should apologize for getting drunk and running my mouth. What a lightweight. I appreciate your interest, Cecelia, I really do. It’s just that I can’t talk about cases I’m working on.”

  “I understand.”

  “Believe me, I’d love nothing better than to be able to talk to you about some of the things I see every day.” Saying the words made him realize how much he valued his late-night talks with his father. He couldn’t imagine life without them.

  She rested her head on his shoulder and they went back to watching the traffic. When the sun came to rest on the roof of the library, she said, “I promise I won’t ask you about work anymore. But if you ever need to talk about it, you just go ahead and talk.” Then she took his chin between her thumb and forefinger and kissed him, her tongue skating along his lips. The world went away for both of them then, and by the time it came back the sun had disappeared behind the library and the museum was closed and they were all alone on the cooling white marble steps.

  They made love in her bed, beginning in the soft, washed-out light of dusk and continuing as the moon came up out of the river and filled the room with hard white light and wine-colored shadows. His tongue was on fire. It traveled over every inch of her, along the creases behind her ears, over the bumps of her vertebrae, across the hot patches behind her knees, up between her legs. Sweat and frenzy followed by cooling and calm, then building right back up, again and again.