Motor City Burning

by Bill Morris

  When the bus stopped in front of the Seven Seas to pick up a passenger, Willie considered getting off and having a few belts. Even at this late hour the place was still packed with people celebrating Denny McLain’s historic win. But he stayed on the bus because he couldn’t wait to see Octavia and tell her his good news.

  He already knew how his book ended—with that despondent bus ride from Atlantic City to Alabama in 1964. Now, thanks to the two homicide cops, he knew how his story ended, too.

  It ended during the riot, on the night Thomas Henderson sprang Willie and Walter Mitchell from jail. When Willie got home that night he must have played Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” fifteen, twenty times. Then he switched to “A Love Supreme.” Coltrane had been dead more than a week, but it wasn’t until that night that Willie began to appreciate how much he was going to miss him. Lying on the floor of his darkened living room, sweating in the heat, listening to ’Trane and drinking can after can of Stroh’s, Willie could hear sirens and gunfire and shouting and he kept hearing the angry woman from the basement garage: When I get out this hole, The Man gonna PAY. . . .

  As the beer went to work, Willie’s body had filled with something he had never felt before. He had felt murderous rage before, on the night that white cop pulled him over, taunted him, humiliated him. But now he was feeling something far more complicated, something far worse, a mixture of pain and shame and rage that would be unbearable to live with for a single day. He understood that he had to make this thing go away, he had to purge it, or it would be the end of him. But how?

  A fist pounding on his door woke him up. He had drifted off to sleep on the floor. His first thought was that the police had come back for him, and he crawled to the door, terrified, not making a sound. When the pounding finally stopped he heard sobbing out in the hall, a man sobbing. “Open up, bruh! It’s me, Wes! Open the fuck up!”

  At first Willie thought his brother had been shot. Then he saw that there was a wicked gash over his left ear—a piece of skull was visible—and the blood was pouring down the side of his face, soaking his shirt. His pants were wet from where he’d pissed himself. Willie ordered him to take off his clothes and sit in the bath tub, and for the next hour he cleaned the gash and listened to his brother babble about how cops and Guardsmen had busted in on the craps game at the Algiers annex and lined everyone up in the hall and pistol-whipped them and ripped the clothes off the white girls and took people into rooms and shot them. Wes wasn’t sure how many were dead. He couldn’t stop sobbing. Willie thought his brother was drunk, then he thought he’d lost his mind, but after a while, remembering his own experience, Wes’s story started to make the worst kind of sense.

  Finally, when Wes’s scalp stopped bleeding, Willie bandaged it with gauze and tape. The cut would need stitches. Willie thought of the night at the veterinarian’s house in Montgomery, that bandage on the gash on John Lewis’s head, the stitches in his own throbbing lip.

  Wes took a long hot shower and put on a clean pair of Willie’s sweatpants and a T-shirt. Then Willie got two beers from the kitchen and they sat on the living room floor in the dark listening to ’Trane while Willie told the story about Walter Mitchell flying in, about the firemen and the beatings and the filthy garage, about Thomas Henderson bailing them out and the mayor calling to apologize. When he finished telling the story he could see, even in the stuffy darkness, that his brother’s eyes were shining.

  Wes said, “Where your Buick at?”

  “Out back. I was afraid to leave it on the street—thought they might recognize it and come back for me.”

  “We ain’t goin far.”

  “Wes, the curfew’s still—”

  “Fuck the curfew. Let’s go.”

  “Where we going?”

  “To my crib. Now quit axin so many questions. It’s payback time. You don’t want a piece a this, then you a stone punk. Gimme the keys to you damn car.”

  Willie realized then that he was being offered a choice and a chance, a chance to purge the unbearable thing that had come to live inside him. Again he remembered the night the white cop pulled him over, whacked his head with the flashlight. His life had come full circle: The thing he was capable of doing then was the thing he was obliged to do now. It would be impossible to live with himself if he didn’t take his brother up on this offer. Right now. He said, “I’ll drive.”

  All the streetlights on Pallister had been shot out. The only light came from a hazy half moon. Willie drove the Buick with its headlights off and his heart in his mouth, just like Mississippi, driving down those country roads in the dark with your lights off and the gas pedal on the floor, praying you didn’t see headlights in the rearview mirror, praying with everything you had in you. Now Willie prayed all the way to the corner of Hamilton.

  Wes told him to turn left and park the car. Then he told him to open the trunk. When Willie did, he was surprised to see a long, lumpy duffel bag next to the spare tire. “How’d that get there?” he said.

  “I put it there,” Wes said.

  “What’s in it?”

  “The fuck you think’s in it?” Wes picked up the bag. It made a clanking noise.

  “How long those guns been in my car?” All Willie could think of was what would have happened if the cops had opened his trunk at the fire station. He’d still be in that garage—with no hope of getting out. Suddenly he was furious. “Wes, how fuckin long have those—”

  “What difference it make?” Wes slammed the trunk shut, a noise that made Willie jump. “Let’s get off this street fore we get our black asses shot.”

  “Goddammit, Wes!” Willie shouted.

  But Wes ignored him. He crossed the lawn and started up the steps that led to the front door of the Larrow Arms. Willie had to hurry to catch up with him. Even in the watery moonlight he could see that his brother was limping.

  Wes took a key from the mop closet on the building’s ground floor, and they went up the darkened staircase tiptoe so as not to wake anybody. They could hear televisions and radios inside some of the apartments. On the fourth floor Wes knocked on the apartment door across the hall from his. The door flew open and there stood Clarence Rawls, a chronically out-of-work autoworker, a part-time car thief and full-time welfare cheat, dressed in a Pistons jersey and cut-off jeans. He had a can of Schlitz malt liquor in one hand and a joint in the other. He was barefoot.

  “If it ain’t the brothers Bledsoe!” Clarence cried, sucking on the joint. “Perfect timing. I just walked in the door my ownself.” He had the curtains drawn. The only light in the apartment came from the color television set, which was showing footage of an orange fire eating a supermarket.

  “What you been up to?” Wes said.

  “Out lootin, like everbody else. Man, I ain’t seen so much innagration in D-troit in all my life—white people helpin black people loot, women with they hair up in curlers, everyone havin a big ole time. I swear, some a them ofays is better at lootin than us brothers.”

  He handed the joint to Wes, who took a deep hit. Willie waved it away.

  “What’d you get?” Wes said.

  “Nothin much tonight, just some necessaries. Some cigarettes and Del Monte’s peaches and a couple fifths a gin. Oh, and I got a nice clock radio for my nephew’s graduatin present.” He opened the door wider. “Come in the house, gentlemens.”

  “Later,” Wes said. “We got a little bidness to take care of first.”

  “What kinda bidness?”

  “Up on the roof.” Wes hefted the duffel bag, that clanking noise again. “You always said you wanted to shoot you a honky, Clarence. Now’s your chance. You comin?”

  “You knows I is!”

  “Bring some beer,” Wes said. “I got the key to the fifth floor.”

  Clarence put on a pair of new sneakers that looked like marshmallows—looted, Willie guessed—and he grabbed two more Schlitz tall boys. The three men marched up the last flight of stairs. As he climbed the stairs, Willie understood that his lif
e was about to change forever and he accepted this with a serenity that surprised him. He welcomed what awaited him on the roof, whatever it proved to be. Someone had to pay for what had happened to him and his brother and the people in the garage and so many others. It was his duty to see that someone paid, and he understood that if he didn’t do his duty he would not be able to go on living.

  They walked across the flat roof, gravel crunching underfoot, and suddenly the city was spread before them. No streetlights burned on this side of Woodward—even the Lodge Freeway was dark—and the carpet of darkness stretched almost all the way to the zoo, miles to the north. The only light came from the moon and the fires, dozens of fires. It looked like a city that had been fire-bombed, Willie thought, like newsreel footage of Dresden or Tokyo, or London during the Blitz. Flames shot into the sky, and Willie remembered how beautiful it had been when he and Walter Mitchell watched the flames jump from that warehouse onto the roof of that pitiful two-story house. Fire had a life of its own.

  Wes rummaged in the duffel bag and handed Willie a Remington 700 with a Unertl scope. It was a decent gun, good up to several hundred yards. Then Wes handed a rifle to Clarence and selected one for himself. It was too dark for Willie to tell what kinds of guns the other two were.

  As Wes passed out ammunition, Willie thought it was a waste to give any to Clarence. At this late hour he was probably seeing triple. But Clarence surprised him. Willie couldn’t find a thing in the Remington’s scope while Clarence, crouching on his right, kept saying, “Lookit that! A motherfuckin cop car, big as day! . . . Oooh-wee, a fire truck! . . . Damn, I just missed that Jeep!” And every time Clarence spoke, Willie’s right ear rang from the rifle’s roar.

  Clarence offered the cans of Schlitz. Wes accepted, but again Willie passed. He couldn’t stomach that skunk piss. Besides, the adrenaline was clearing his head, and this was no time to get sloppy. He had already decided to select his targets carefully, to go for police cars, fire trucks, tanks, Jeeps, men in uniform—anything that shared responsibility for the nightmares he and his brother had just been through. If vengeance was going to accomplish its mission, it had to be precise, an eye for an eye, no more and no less. To kill randomly would be to cheapen the purity of his rage. He was making the rules now. He was above the law, outside the law. He had finally repudiated the world that made him—he had repudiated America itself—and he felt free, truly free and truly alive, for the first time in his life.

  But when he got off a clean shot at a police car speeding out the Lodge Freeway, he was yards behind it.

  “Remember what I tole you back in Alabama,” Wes said, squeezing off a shot. “Shit. Missed him. Your target’s the eighteen inches between the chin and the belt buckle.”

  Willie got off a shot at a Jeep parked on the far side of the freeway but missed badly again. It drove off while he was reloading.

  “Y’all see dat?!” Clarence cried.

  Willie and Wes peered through their scopes. “See what?” they said in unison.

  “That buildin just past the left corner a the hospital. The one with the tank in front a it . . . three, four floors up . . . a woman standin in the window, lit up like a motherfuckin Christmas tree. Y’all see it?”

  “Yeah, I see it,” Wes said.

  “I see it,” Willie said.

  What he saw was a dark silhouette—a woman in a dress—lit from behind. The silhouette wobbled and came to rest in the cross-hairs. Willie’s face was wet and suddenly he felt cold. He waited. The shape didn’t move. He could hear sirens in the distance, the chatter of automatic weapons fire. He felt for the trigger and held his breath, the way his brother had taught him to do in the woods outside Tuskegee.

  “All right, muthafuckas,” Clarence said. “This is it. We takin the honky bitch down together. On the count a three. One . . .”

  The woman moved half a step to her left and Willie’s cross-hairs moved with her. He was steady as a stone.

  “Two . . .”

  A doubt entered Willie’s mind. This was no Guardsman or cop in the cross-hairs. It was a civilian. A woman. Somebody’s wife, maybe somebody’s mother. At this distance it wasn’t even possible to tell for sure if she was black or white. No—

  “Three!”

  Clarence’s rifle went off first, a terrifying jolt. Then, a fraction of a second later, the gun to Willie’s left boomed. In the instant he decided he was not going to squeeze the trigger, he felt the Remington kick into his shoulder. The woman had disappeared from the window. Willie felt sick. What just happened?

  “I got the bitch!” Wes shouted over the ringing in Willie’s ears. “I fuckin got the bitch!”

  “The fuck you did,” Clarence shouted back. “I got the bitch!”

  “Fuck you, nigger!”

  “No, fuck you!”

  As their ecstatic shouting went back and forth, Willie kept looking at the window through his scope. The woman was still gone. Suddenly the window went dark. Someone started shooting from inside the building, then tracer fire started pouring from the street into the building.

  Peering over the edge of the roof, Clarence said, “Here comes a po-lice. Time to split, my brothers.”

  They hustled down the dark stairs and into Wes’s apartment. He drew the curtains and lit a candle and put it on the floor. Willie’s hands were shaking as he wiped down the Remington and handed it to Wes and watched him tuck it into the duffel bag. Then he watched Wes wipe down Clarence’s gun—a 7.62 millimeter Garand with a powerful Redfield scope that magnified objects to ten times their actual size. No wonder crazy drunk Clarence had been able to spot so many targets. Then Wes wiped down his own gun, a Winchester Model 70 with a Starlight infra-red scope. The murder weapon. When all three guns were zipped inside the duffel bag, Wes stowed the bag in the space he’d hollowed out under the linoleum floor in the kitchen.

  And now, riding the bus out Woodward, Willie finally knew how his story ended. He got off the bus at Tuxedo Street and hurried toward Octavia’s building. He flew down the sidewalk, so light he thought he might float away. He had gotten away with helping his brother get away with murder, and he didn’t regret it. If Wes wasn’t innocent, he was a long way from guilty. Willie had gotten rid of his pain and his shame and his rage—those things he could not live with—and the stone of guilt in his guts was finally gone. He hadn’t wanted that woman to die, and he hadn’t killed her. He was free for the first time in his life. He had no unpaid debts, he had no scores to settle, and he no longer had anything to fear from any man.

  26

  THE WORLD SERIES BETWEEN THE TIGERS AND THE CARDINALS opened on Oct. 2 in Busch Stadium in St. Louis. Late that morning Anthony Capriati, the dapper little Wayne County prosecutor with watered hair, red galluses, and a loud paisley necktie, told Doyle and Jimmy Robuck something they already knew. He, Capriati, was not going to press charges in the Helen Hull case, not even weapons charges.

  “You boys haven’t got shit and we all know it,” Capriati told them. “Even if you go drag Wes Bledsoe back from Saigon or Singapore or wherever the hell he is, you still haven’t got enough to get him to cop to Man One because his fingerprints aren’t on the murder weapon. They’re on a beer can. Sure, you might be able to prove he sold the murder weapon, but that doesn’t mean he was the one who fired the fatal shot. And he might tell you a completely different story from the one his brother told you about the rooftop—and be able to back it up. And you think there had to be a third person on the roof because you’ve got someone else’s prints on the murder weapon, but we all know that a hundred people could’ve handled that gun in the fifteen months since the shooting took place.”

  Doyle managed to get in two and a half words. “But Mayor Cav—”

  “Don’t start in about Jerry Cavanagh again. I don’t give a rat’s ass how bad Hizzoner wants this thing to go down. I’m up for re-election next month and I’m not taking on a sure loser. Especially not one with this much visibility. Thanks for stopping by, gentlemen.”


  Doyle drove to the Harlan House because he wanted to break the news to Henry Hull in person. As always, the door to Room 450 was ajar. But instead of the familiar clutter, Doyle was surprised to find tidy stacks of cardboard boxes, bare walls and a spotless coffee table. There were two large suitcases in the corner by the little refrigerator. Henry was sitting alone on the sofa staring at the television set.

  “This is terrible!” he moaned when Doyle knocked and entered the room.

  “Listen, Mr. Hull. I just want you to know how sorry I—”

  “The Cards just scored three runs off McLain—and Gibson’s already struck out twelve of our guys!”

  Doyle looked at the television set. The volume was turned all the way down and Ernie Harwell’s voice was coming out of a transistor radio on the coffee table. The grass in sparkling new Busch Stadium looked even better than the lawn in front of Doyle’s brother’s house. He watched as Willie Horton let a called third strike zip past his kneecaps.

  Ernie Harwell didn’t even try to hide his disgust. “Willie just stood there like a house by the side of the road and watched that one go by. Thirteen strike-outs now for Gibson.”

  “Thirteen!” Henry cried.

  “Mr. Hull. . . .”

  “Have a seat, Frankie.” Henry patted the sofa, and Doyle sat next to him, facing the television set. “You don’t gotta tell me how it went with the D.A. I had it figured out soon as you told me about having to let that Bledsoe fella go.”

  Doyle told him about Capriati anyway. Then they watched the game for a while, not talking. The Tigers looked like a bunch of scared Little Leaguers—or maybe Bob Gibson really was that good. During the seventh-inning stretch Henry said, “Look in the fridge, Frankie. Should be some beer in there. Grab us a couple. I need one.”

  Doyle opened the refrigerator. It contained half a bag of carrots and three cans of Budweiser. He took two. “Budweiser?” he said, wrinkling his nose as he handed a can to Henry and popped one for himself. “Isn’t this swill from St. Louis?”